Society and Culture

1. Origins of criticism in vanity. Birth of the critic in the undergraduate classroom, where truth is the podium on which pretentious youth elevates itself above the masses. Criticism as self-congratulation: the critic knows better, is the chosen one who will rid the world of error.

2. The noble mission of criticism. Maturity and immersion in the cause bring self-forgetfulness out of a genuine desire for a changed society. Passion for the world's potential supplants self-aggrandizement as the critic's motivation.

3. Self-corrosion. Love of what ought to be, gradually, becomes contempt of what is. The slowness of society to change disillusions the once idealist into a misanthrope, seeing only the world's worst. As acid eats its container, years of acrid words corrode the speaker's humanity.

Criticism seldom changes society for the better, but often changes the critic for the worse.

Riding in the caravan of the dead, a peculiar sight: cell-phone-talking teenage drivers, soccer moms in SUVs, and bankers in BMWs all pulling to the road's shoulder. Why this wide berth for death? Do they wish to get as far from the leprous corpse as possible? Is their swerving meant as pity, as in sorry for your loss, may I offer my side of the road? Are they startled to see the hearse—the last car they too will ride in?

They themselves do not know why they stop. Customs are a culture's deep thoughts, embodied in the thoughtless actions of its people.

Often the shock of a shooting spree is that we never guessed the inner magnitude of the gunman's despair. Meeting neighbors in public, he would shake their hands and talk of sports or politics. How could such a maelstrom be swirling beneath so placid a surface?

A desperate man moves through society like a wave through deep water: we never know its power till, suddenly rising, it bursts against the rocks.

People who advocate cutting car emissions, installing solar panels, and cleaning up watersheds to "help the environment" speak naively. They frame conservation as a moral issue—humanity restraining itself for the good of vulnerable creatures and defenseless habitats. Rather, the point of conservation is to keep humanity off the endangered species list. Can overfished rivers feed the future's billions? Can populations drink pollution? Can GDP flourish when, oil gone, we are back to burning candles? In four hundred years, the future may look prehistoric. Picture Europe regressed to the Pleistocene, where twenty-fifth century cavemen scavenge among the ruins of the Uffizi.

Environmentalism is not about saving nature, but saving civilization.

Everyone seeks their soul's good, even in seeking their body's pleasure. Hedonists hope their material enjoyment will reach inside and touch the marrow of their being. Is this not what saints are seeking, by alternate experiments? A middle-aged rich man in a red convertible, cruising the Amalfi coast with a model half his age, is merely another kind of monk, whose spiritual discipline is indulgence. Every mall is a monastery where the initiates seek beatitude, not by selling everything before they enter, but by buying everything before they leave.

A mere ankle used to arouse a man, but now midriffs, thongs, and cleavage barely wake men's sluggish lust—free appetizers shoveled upon the plates of the sated.

Despite our condescension toward Victorian prudery, repression bred a more intriguing sexual world than modern looseness and liberation. Scorned by morality, desire crept beneath gentility. Sexuality, like the proper name of God in Judaism, was never spoken of yet permeated the mind. A Victorian bachelor, bursting with decades of pent passion, fought the daily inner war of being a gentleman with genitals. Contrast the silly stars of modern television, quenching their lust as mindlessly as mounted monkeys. Promiscuity blunts their pleasure's edge, just as drunkards taste their liquor least. What do rock stars sampling women's bodies nightly know of the sex drive? Fasters, not feasters, feel hunger's ferocity.

Similarly, high school sexuality is more interesting than college sexuality because the colossal urges and instincts of adolescence are checked and impeded by the lingering authorities of parents, teachers, and principals. High school sex is secrets and sneaking out and dark back seats, while in college the reins are clipped and the goat of instinct rushes headlong into debauchery. Sexuality loses its tension and, with it, its worthiness of attention.

Great forces are best revealed against their opposites. Sex needs repression as a storm wave needs a sea wall.

When I see nature bulldozed to build subdivisions, I feel anger toward the developers. But when I drive by later and see the new homes filled with families, my anger goes flaccid. Must not the families live somewhere? True, they had homes before, but those homes now house others, and the others' old homes house others too. Trace the trail of new construction back to its origin, and you arrive at a hospital maternity ward humming like a factory day and night, sending endless swaddled shipments of future homebuyers into the world. Developers build because parents beget. Suburbs sprawl because lovers do.

At a wedding last weekend, a girl was present whom my wife had not seen since high school and did not recognize at first. Apparently in high school she was rather plain and unremarkable, whereas now, at 26 or 27, she is all elegance and glamour. She is living in Boston as a shoe designer. She wore a black, backless dress with a low, V-shaped front. Her hair was no longer straight and brown but blond and wavy, and she wore it half-up. She had a tan without being too tan. She smiled and talked to her friends and drank a beer and danced often.

The next day, reviewing her old appearance in my wife's high school yearbook, I was surprised by her transformation, for in the old photo it was clearly the same face, and all that seemed to have changed was her hairstyle, her fashion, and her posture (which in the photo was slumped and unconfident). I had trouble deciding whether her high school plainness had masked a beautiful face, or her twenty-something glamour now masks a plain face. I tend to think the former, and if so, it makes me wonder how many other girls may be beautiful incognito.

Had my wife not told me this girl was not always so attractive, I might have guessed it from her demeanor. She acted like someone newly pretty. Girls who have always been pretty strut about like shining goddesses among mortals, aloof and scornful. Woe to the flirtatious male if he is not as gorgeous as she! Woe to any friend who aspires to be more than her mere attendant! The girl at the wedding was too unused to her looks to be arrogant. She evidently retains the fresh memory of her adolescent plainness and is still learning to believe in her new beauty, as if the mirror's reflection and men's attention compete in her self-esteem against the insecurities engrained over years. She hopes, rather than quite believes, in her beauty; her fledging faith craves additional proof. When men smile at her, her sincere and surprised smile seems to say, "then you do find me pretty?"

Have things taken such a turn that the animal, whose reason gives it a claim to divinity, cannot seem beautiful to itself except by the possession of lifeless trappings? -Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

A lady wears a diamond around her neck, and because of it she feels beautiful. Yet what would a diamond be without a lady? All matter is uniform and worthless until humans give it value. Consider the life history of that lifeless stone. Forged by earth's forces and inner fires over many millennia, before any human being walked earth's crust, the diamond came to rest in a bed of subterranean rock, covered with meters of dirt, in pitch darkness. Bacteria grew around it. Silent eons passed. Eventually, in these latter days, miners dug a shaft to it and chipped it free, a craftsman carved its edges until it shone, a man spent a month's salary to buy it, and now it hangs on his lover's neck.

Lady, your jewel does not make you beautiful, you make your jewel beautiful.

I enjoy going to wedding receptions more, the fewer people I know there. My own wedding, where I knew everyone, was such a blur of congratulations that, for all the planning I put into the evening, I scarcely got to see how it came off. But at a friend's wedding with whom I share few mutual friends, I can watch the night unfold from a well-chosen table, interrupted only by the waiter who comes occasionally to refill my wine glass. I would rather watch a conversation than listen to one; I prefer observing mirth and merriment to making them myself. A groomsman with too much to drink is flirting badly with a pretty bridesmaid; the sweating photographer is lumbering under his hundred gadgets through the crowd; the disc jockey is trying third-rate jokes on the captive audience. Chatting would interrupt this study of types. A good sociologist must be a recluse.