The following comes from Tom Hoopes at Catholic Vote:
Being Catholic is the ultimate countercultural lifestyle choice, and college students notice that kind of thing.
My daughter alerted me to the blog post “All Hipsters Eventually Become Catholic” by Edmund Mitchell. He observes the college-aged, culture-loving, alternative-band listening, European-dressing “hipster” culture and writes:
“Isn’t it true that living out the Catholic faith in modern society is the ultimate anti-mainstream life of non-conformity and going-against-the-flow? And the Catholic culture we’ve inherited provides a wealth of uncool topics to choose from.” He goes on to list his counter-cultural Catholic likes and dislikes.
The way we framed the discussion in our day was as a series of “Is it Cartesian or is it Catholic?” questions.
Cartesian meant it stemmed from Rene Descartes, the French Enlightenment founding father who said “I think, therefore I am” and thereby placed himself as the autonomous body-less center of his own spiritual universe. From that, we held, came radical individualism, relativism, mind and body separation and, as we will see shortly, stupid dance music.
Catholic meant it stemmed from the civilization of love built by the incarnate God who refused to stay removed from us. “Catholic” meant aware, enfleshed, messy-but-real humanity whose existence was defined by community as much as by self.
Our “Catholic or Cartesian?” discussions went something like this:
Cigarettes are Cartesian; cigars are Catholic.
Cigarettes are Cartesian because they take you into yourself and away from your surroundings. You usually smoke them alone, on break outside your building, to end stress not by confronting it but by dodging it.
Cigars, on the other hand, are smoked in company with others. They are not an escape from reality but a deeper immersion in it. Cigarettes suck you into your mind; cigars immerse you in your own corporeality. That’s Catholic.
Metrics are Cartesian; inches and feet are Catholic.
Metrics are Cartesian because they were invented in some mental laboratory where everything is perfect and lines intersect and a milliliter is a certain fraction of a liter in the same way that a millimeter is a certain fraction of a meter, as if the universe was created by an OCD Austrian scientist God.
Inches and feet were Catholic because they started as body parts: Inch was a word for thumb and feet are, well, feet, and they can be measured in paces. A yard was an arms-length of cloth. It’s acceptable that all of these things bowed to the need for standardization: They were still measures of man, not artificial mathematical constructs.
Electric keyboards are Cartesian, electric guitars are Catholic.
Electric keyboards make odd made-up noises, according to what the computer chip tells them to do. No matter how you feel inside, or what you do to the keyboard, the keys do what the computer says. The electronic keyboard is the staple of stupid dance music, which by extension is Cartesian.
Electric guitars twang and bend depending on what you do to them with your fingers. If you do it right, they become an extension of your body-soul union. Even if you do it wrong, they still kind of do. The electric guitar is the staple of awesome music, which is by extension Catholic.
Disneyland is Cartesian, mountains are Catholic.
Disneyland is Cartesian because you go there to leave the real and enter a fantasy world invented by a man who thought that science would save the world, starting with him.*
(*Yes, we also thought Disneyland was awesome, and we wanted to go there. We also smoked cigarettes and listened to stupid dance music. I don’t deny our hypocrisy.)
Hiking was Catholic because you go to the mountains to experience real adventure, not “Adventureland;” real danger, not the “Matterhorn;” and real companionship, with human beings who aren’t dressed as animals. And it was all invented by God, who didn’t need to be cryogenically frozen to endure forever.
Madonna was Cartesian, Bob Dylan was Catholic.
Yes, I know that the very opposite was true in one sense, but that’s what made this one so instructive for us in college.
After all, Madonna sang stupid songs (except “La Isla Bonita,” which was kind of nice when it came on in the grocery store) that turned life into a paper-thin two-dimensional version of the real thing, while Dylan sang rich, textured songs which revealed the many layers of the real living and breathing thing called life. His songs also made no sense, but that was a secondary consideration for us at the time.
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