Vox clamantis in deserto
Over at Volokh Conspiracy, Juan Non-Volokh comments on Ave Maria Law School, whose founder wants to move the school from Michigan to rural Florida in order to create a kind of Ave Maria Town which is run in accord with Catholic principles. Non-Volokh mentions Ann Althouse's observation that the idea is a bit "creepy."
Jacques responds in the comments section:
If the point were to block the students (and faculty?) from all pernicious influences, it would be naive. But of course it's nothing of the sort. It's an attempt to create an environment, complete with public spaces, where Catholic Christian values can be expressed, and things considered clearly evil are refused publicity and promotion.
Those of us who travel with our young children frequently enounter condom machines in roadside bathrooms, child's eye-level pornography in airport concessions, massage parlour and stripjoint billboards along the highway. Do we really need the intrusion of others' choices of this sort into our daily life to be living in the "real" world? I can remember when these were the sort of things one would consider "creepy," not the efforts of town planners to create some space where sex was, not secret, not devalued, not forbidden, but simply private and intimate.
Jacques responds in the comments section:
If the point were to block the students (and faculty?) from all pernicious influences, it would be naive. But of course it's nothing of the sort. It's an attempt to create an environment, complete with public spaces, where Catholic Christian values can be expressed, and things considered clearly evil are refused publicity and promotion.
Those of us who travel with our young children frequently enounter condom machines in roadside bathrooms, child's eye-level pornography in airport concessions, massage parlour and stripjoint billboards along the highway. Do we really need the intrusion of others' choices of this sort into our daily life to be living in the "real" world? I can remember when these were the sort of things one would consider "creepy," not the efforts of town planners to create some space where sex was, not secret, not devalued, not forbidden, but simply private and intimate.
posted by Kate Marie | 7:56 PM | Permalink
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8 comments
8 Comments:
I read about the Ave Maria Law School and wondered what the fuss is all about. I agree with the Jacques you quote. There's more than enough "real world" all around us, thank you.
I don't know. Sounds a bit too much like the Islamic attitude to me, wanting to shut out the rest of the world, the implicit condemnation of the rest of the world.
The world's too small for these sorts of ethnic and religious enclaves.
But Winston, this seems the opposite of the Islamic attitude to me -- a bunch of people, in a secular and religiously pluralistic society, who are freely choosing to live in an environment that refuses to promote values they consider evil or harmful. They aren't seeking to impose it on anyone else.
But what happens if this attempt at self-segregation is successful? What will the attitudes of the second- and third-generation residents be? Particularly since you know their attempts to lock out these "pernicious influences" will only be partially successful.
Just smacks too much of fundamentalism to me.
I just don't see it, Winston. There are plenty of self-segregated communities in the U.S. right now (the Amish, for example)and I've never felt there was anything to fear from them. They seem to want to be left alone to lead what they consider to be a virtuous and meaningful life. I'm not a "fundamentalist," but I don't necessarily consider it "creepy" in others. A fundamentalist theocracy is one thing, but a "fundamentalist" community within a secular, religiously pluralist state is something else. (That's not to say that I would necessarily consider such a community fundamentalist -- I wouldn't generally class conservative Catholicism in that category).
I need to think about this some more, but my first reaction is to be as creeped out as Winston is. I can't help but find this sort of head-for-the-hills separatism deeply discouraging, no matter which sect engages in it.
Essentially, what these folks are doing is creating a campus where the school owns the land and can impose its own rules, which is hardly a unique arrangement, but that sort of situation doesn't always end well. Certainly the results in academia have been mixed at best. Consider the many stories we've all heard during the past few years about abuses of conduct codes, speech codes, etc., on college campuses, not all of them limited to the loony left. Granted, the difference here is that if "Ave Maria Town" opens for business, folks will move there knowing full well what they're getting themselves into--at least at first. But I'd bet money that within a generation, their community will experience a schism over the definition of "Catholic identity." That's the problem with little utopias: they can turn pretty nasty rather quickly.
I don't know, I think I could retire here and be happy.
Until the hurricane season starts up, anyway.
Top down planning, planned communties, communes -- none of this stuff lasts long or lasts as planned for very long. But I don't think it is creepy to want to live in a place where you don't have to worry about your kids constantly running into porn, soft porn, and obscenity all the time. Plus imagine how easy it will be to find a convenient Mass time.
Looks nice, CIV. :)
I agree that this doesn't appear to be a Jonestown or Koresh type of separatism. Based on my admittedly cursory reading of the article, it looks more like a planned community -- the kind that tends to get watered down by contact with the outside world rather than the true separatist group that hunkers down as if under siege. And while I understand your uneasiness about the separatist impulse, Winston and Jeff, I think Jacques has a point that the reluctance of most people to call stripjoint billboards or, say, soft-porn Victoria's Secret window displays "creepy" has some part in prompting this Brook Farm reaction (and, yeah, I know that didn't turn out too well :).
I remember walking around an area of what's called "old town" Pasadena a couple of years ago, before either of my children could read, and seeing a girl who was probably no more than twenty wearing a black T-shirt that said, in white letters, "Too cool to f---. Nowadays, I might have to explain that T-shirt, or at least explain to my seven year old why it's wrong to say a word she can fairly easily read and pronounce, and that she saw a "cool" young woman advertising unabashedly in public. What's the recourse for someone like me, who doesn't want to shield my children completely from the outside world, but who would like to control their exposure and guide their reactions to/interpretations of such things? When "mainstream" communities increasingly fail to uphold any (or very few) standards of public decency, when it's likely that I would be labeled a prude for frowning at the girl's T-shirt or the porn-like window display, I admit I find myself in enough sympathy with the self-segregating communities not to want to call them creepy.
I don't know, though. Maybe I *am* being a prudish mother hen.
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