Cracks in Pomo, Dorothy Day, & the Catholic Worker
notes from our Friday Night discussion: "The Duty of Seeking Delight in our Postmodern Culture"
Stephen’s notes from his discussion with Emilia Tanu, , and our friends at the Catholic Worker Maryhouse (NYC) on 12/13.
Over the last two years, the Catholic Worker Maryhouse has graciously allowed us to host events in their space. From our first zine launch party to Holy Lit! (which drew in over 120 guests), we left the Catholic Workers wondering who this strange group of scenesters in their 20s and 30s—going on about Camille Paglia and Azalea Banks—is. Thus, when Joanne and Liam reached out asking us to speak at a Friday night meeting on what exactly we’re about and what our connection with Dorothy Day is, we felt deeply honored.
So what exactly is Cracks in PoMo? Honestly, we’re still trying to figure that out. Like Jesus once said, you kinda need to “come and see” in order to figure us out. Hopefully, as you read and listen to our content and come to our events, you'll find the common thread uniting all the things we do.
But we’ll at least I’ll try to delineate the main inspiration behind our platform and the role Dorothy and the CW have played in it, as well as the range of topics we cover and what our ultimate goals are.
Peering through the cracks to find God
The literary scholar Wayne C. Booth once said that
postmodernist theories of the social self have not explicitly acknowledged the religious implications of what they are about. But if you read them closely, you will see that more and more of them are talking about the human mystery in terms that resemble those of the subtlest traditional theologies.
While studying the various iterations of postmodernism in school, I recognized that in general, they tend to critique the errors of modern Enlightenment thought. Whether they succeed in correcting them is another question.
Some would argue that the so-called father of postmodernism Nietzsche’s claims that “God is dead” and that “there are no facts, only interpretations” make him an enemy of religion. Yet if one looks closely at Nietzsche’s thought—and life—one might be able to detect a door that opens to a sort of apophatic, mystical theology that allows us to rediscover ancient religious truths, but in a way that engages our subjectivity which pre-modern (and modern) theologies struggled to do.
Numerous thinkers ranging from Simone Weil to Cardinal Ratzinger and John Milbank have walked through this door, finding the sacred through the cracks of postmodernism. Yet of course, we can’t afford to be naive about the other doors that postmodernism’s cracks lead to—technocratic power, false ideologies, apathy, and senseless violence…just to name a few.
Aside from the intellectual and spiritual doors that postmodernism opens, it has the capacity to generate a form of playfulness and humor that’s much needed in our dour, self-serious age. As Chesterton once quipped, “humor can get in under the door while seriousness is still fumbling at the handle.” Our fear is that Enlightenment rationalism placed too much focus on the individual’s duty to be coherent and self-regulating. Its legacy continues in the moralism and self-righteousness within today’s culture wars. Too many of us take our own opinions too seriously. We act as if we are God–that we know everything and that the future is in our hands.
But the reality is that we are not God. We don’t know everything. We humans are incredibly dumb and irrational. And we are not going to save anyone.
If we don’t know how to poke fun at ourselves, we won’t know how to be humble. And if we don’t know how to be humble, we won’t be able to allow God to enter into our lives. The playfulness of postmodern thought—as much as it can at times bend toward amorality and nihilistic irony—is something worth salvaging. Thus our commitment to making people laugh a little bit and take themselves less seriously. For this, we turn especially to Catholics with a deep sense of humor like Chesterton and Albacete—as well as to those with a “decadent” camp sensibility like Wilde, Huysmans, and Warhol—who were able to synthesize their faith with a playful sense of humor.
What does Dorothy have to do with it?
Now, how do we square this away with Dorothy Day–who was a rather serious, deeply moral, politically involved person who took her duty to further the common good seriously?
As much as our project at cracks in pomo may not be an activist/political one, what we hold in common with Dorothy, Peter Maurin, and the CW is the conviction that matters of metaphysics/spirituality and aesthetics/culture are primary…and that our ethical and political commitments must flow out of these.
Dorothy’s social activism sprung from her intense prayer life and the hours she spent listening to music, reading literature, and gazing at nature. She understood that one could not further the common good without gratitude for the goodness of God’s gifts in one’s life. Dorothy would often quote John Ruskin’s line about the “duty of delight.” Our mission takes this duty seriously, and in a way echoes Ruskin’s reservations about the stuffy moralistic Victorian Christians of his time. People who have strong political or moral convictions without a real joie the vivre, a gusto for life—for the beauty of nature, art, human beings, the body, conviviality, food and drink—and who can’t even laugh at themselves, will not be likely to bring much good into the world.
Thus, the prophet and the court jester go hand in hand; their missions complement each other. This is something that Jewish comedians have always understood. Dorothy was not the kind of prophet who is overly self-serious—she was well aware of her flaws and was not afraid to acknowledge them…and she also recognized that her prophetic mission had to be fueled by her investment in prayer as well as in the arts and literature.
Jane herself was just telling us that the people who thought Dorothy was serious all the time clearly did not know her all that well, as she proceeded to tell us a story about when Dorothy caught a sight of her cigarettes and tried to get her to buy her a pack without the priest they were traveling with noticing.
My favorite of Dorothy’s more lighthearted moments was retold by her granddaughter Kate in her biography of Dorothy (which I cited in my essay on Dorothy’s sexuality):
Even more than 30 years after their breakup, Dorothy continued to dream about [her ex]. She once waltzed out of the kitchen carrying freshly made cinnamon buns and gleefully announced to her friends that she had had a dream of being in bed with Batterham, reminding them that “you can’t be held responsible for what you dream!”
Also, Dorothy herself was a major fan of decadent Catholic writers like Huysmans, whose Durtal series played a role in her conversion.
Our focus
The majority of our content focuses on cultural commentary, especially on the intersection between pop culture (celebrities, music, movies, books, internet trends) and philosophy/religion. We find that it’s important to offer intellectually nuanced and spiritually grounded takes on pop culture for the sake of “clarifying our thoughts” about and understanding the culture around us. This very meeting we are at tonight is a continuation of the weekly “clarification of thought” meetings that Peter Maurin initiated.
[Brennan Vickery goes on to talk about pop culture, sexuality, religion, and his doubts about the real value of “think pieces” and internet discourse; cites his essays on gay musicians, R&B music, and Matt Rife.]
Despite prioritizing cultural content, we do also publish content on social issues—but almost always from a cultural or spiritual lens. We are strictly non-partisan, but when we do cover social and political topics, we do try to emphasize the importance of subsidiarity and solidarity by platforming localist ideals and voices who attempt to forge roots, unity, and communal ties amidst social and ideological divides.
[Emilia Tanu goes on to talk about her very human, non-ideological takes on rather divisive issues and her localist outlook; cites her essays on tradwives and building community in her neighborhood.]
What’s the point?
We are well aware that our little platform is not going to change the world. It’s not going to provide for the needs of the downtrodden or resolve the challenges the current social order as does the Catholic Worker. Rather, our main hope is to offer clarification of thought in the midst of the very confusing and divisive discourse that infiltrates the public square. We want to provoke people to look at divisive issues from a non-conventional angle that prioritizes our most fundamental needs as human beings—the needs for beauty, meaning, truth, justice, love, community—with the hope to plant the seed of a new kind of discourse that has the capacity to unite people from across cultural, religious, and political spectra.
On top of being deeply concerned by the discourse’s tendency to divide us, to distract us from what we have in common and from our ability to collaborate and engage in direct action together to further the common good, we are also deeply concerned about the tendency of highly concentrated, technocratic entities of power that operate at a far remove from everyday people to control the way we think and act.
Both the news and everyday people's social media posts are sounding more and more algorithmically generated, as if we’re following a script. What happened to the capacity for nuanced thought, to generate original and complex ideas? The more power is concentrated, the more we are influenced to think and act in ways that benefit those in power rather than ourselves and our neighbor.
Thus, we are not interested in telling people what to think about divisive political and ethical issues. Surely I have my beliefs about them, as do Brennan and Emilia. But what’s more important than you agreeing with me is that you actually think in an intelligent, nuanced way about these issues—in a way that doesn’t fail to account for the most fundamental elements of your nature and experiences as a human being.
And so, we aim to reach a wide array of people, as did Dorothy, who would often draw people of various religious and political beliefs to the CW.
Still today, I’m always struck by all the different kinds of people that work at and come to the CW. You’re all over the place. You all have a different read on Dorothy’s mission, on politics, etc. But what unites you is your commitment to hospitality–treating the guest as Christ himself. Every time I bring people here, I’m struck by how we are treated. We also aim to welcome different kinds of people and to bring them into conversation with each other about important issues.
One thing we’re proud of was having a super traditionalist and a super progressive person write very similar articles about urban planning, coming from different angles, but who in the end made pretty much the same argument—because they agreed about certain fundamental elements of human nature and flourishing.
And like Dorothy, we aim to be C(c)atholic in both senses of the word. We are strongly rooted in a Catholic worldview, and aim to never disobey the Church, while our small c catholic side aims to engage with all kinds of people, with a desire for solidarity with all of our neighbors.
In closing, I’d like to cite the title of Dorothy’s autobiography: the Long Loneliness. Dorothy attempt to highlight the fact that all human beings feel a deep-seated loneliness that nothing and no one—other than God—can resolve…and paradoxically, God reaches us through community, through other people who aim not so much to fill that loneliness, but to share it with us and to walk with us toward He who is able to fill it. It is in that loneliness, which cracks through all of the noise of our postmodern culture, that enables us to rediscover the truth of who we are and He who made us and calls us to Himself.
And so, we encourage you all to take up the duty to delight in our postmodern culture—to choose to share this loneliness with others, to receive the gifts that God sends us through the cracks, and and to laugh it all—refusing to let the enemy rob us of our joy, our gratitude, our sense of humor…and—no matter how perplexing and sinister our times may seem—to sing out with the Three Youths “light and darkness, bless the Lord!…Praise and exalt him above all forever!”
I keep _trying_ to like your shit, Stephen. Then you go and do something [redacted] like post a photo of you in a T-shirt with all the type unreadable and backwards.
Æsthetics matter, as any Papist knows.