More Travel and Dining Expenses for "Bowdlerizing Brigham"?

[Gadianton]

Here is a thought experiment for you. So, apologists cannot drink the great wines of Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Champagne (etc). And there is obvious resentment about this. Like, if you are someone who measures your self-worth via your experience with “worldly” things, and yet, you’re deprived from tasting something that Alexandre Dumas said should only be drunk while one is “on one’s knees,” how are you supposed to feel about that?

It's a fantastic thought experiment, and yes, it's a huge problem. A gaping problem. There are two things going on here: the first is utility maximization. In this realm, subjectivity counts for something. The apologists eat ice cream instead of drink wine. Okay, great. But in terms of the personal notoriety that comes with high consumption, this is a problem. Remember, the apologists are using their high consumption in terms of travel, literature, and food, as means to "-t-rump" any criticism coming from the critics. They don't need to answer a question if the critic isn't qualified to ask it because the critic has a lower social attainment, but that only works so long as we all implicitly agree on the comparative yardstick.

Here's the crazy thing: I *somewhat* agree with the apologists here. Very few of us are "jealous" if somebody reveals they spent all day doing crack, even if that means they experienced impossibly high level of pleasure that we will never experience. There is an objective side to living a worldly lifestyle that instills envy within other people that goes beyond brute measures of pleasure. Somebody driving a fancy car instills more envy than somebody shooting up heroin even if the level of pleasure is technically lower and even if the car costs less than the drug habit.

Let's go back to Jack Chick's pamphlet, "This was your life". It's a total classic. Think about what's going on here. If instead of having the rich guy smiling and swirling his glass of wine, the rich guy has got a cone with four scoops of ice cream, it wouldn't connect, it would seem ridiculous. Of course somebody going around eating a bunch of ice cream and bragging about it is a fool! We know that without needing a cartoon to satirize it. The big house, the nice car, and drinking expensive wine are iconic jealousy triggers. Yeah, we can see the absurdity of it, we might have good reason to believe many such people are empty, but most of us wouldn't mind giving that lifestyle a try should we have the chance.

And so even with all the exotic travel destinations, there are all these gaps in the travel logs of the apologists, such as the inability to enjoy a fine glass of wine that, that render the iconography of their conspicuous consumption unintelligible.

[Limnor]

The portrayal fails even before the disappointments of being unable to sample fine wine. The cosmopolitan mystique suffers when it’s an overweight PhD defending cureloms and seer stones while traveling to exotic places like Keokuk, Iowa. Not exactly the picture of Satan laughing with delight.

[I Have Questions]

I doubt CS Lewis would have found Mormonism an attractive proposition, given the sentiments he expresses and which are quoted here Not exactly a glowing endorsement of organised religion. Does Peterson see himself as having a sort of spiritual gaucherie perhaps? Hence why a senior mission is still absent from his resume…

I am reminded of lines that Lewis wrote in 1955 letters:

It is right and inevitable that we shd. [should] be much concerned about the salvation of those we love. But we should be careful not to expect or demand that their salvation shd. conform to some ready-made pattern of our own. Some Protestant sects have gone very wrong about this. They have a whole programme of conversion etc. marked out, the same for everyone, and will not believe that anyone can be saved who doesn’t go through it ‘just so’. But … God has His own way with each soul. There is no evidence that St. John had the same kind of ‘conversion’ as St. Paul…. I’m afraid I am not going to be much help about all the religious bodies mentioned in your letter of March 2nd. I have always in my books been concerned simply to put forward ‘mere’ Christianity, and am no guide on these (most regrettable) ‘inter-denominational’ questions. I do however strongly object to the tyrannic and unscriptural insolence of anything that calls itself a Church and makes teetotalism a condition of membership. Apart from the more serious objection that Our Lord Himself turned water into wine and made wine the medium of the only rite He imposed on all His followers), it is so provincial (what I believe you people call 'small town'). Don't they realize that Christianity arose in the Mediterranean world where, then as now, wine was as much part of the normal diet as bread? It was the 17th Century Puritans who first made the universal into a rich man's luxury.

Posted from Crumbl Cookie Creek, Utah

Thank you for that Tom. It’s interesting that the Afore hero worships someone with views so at odds with Mormonism. Does the Afore hanker for a life without the boundaries imposed upon it by his church? I mean, C.S. Lewis seems to hold a position on organised religion that is much closer to that of Hitchins - someone the Afore ridicules. Glaringly ironic, no?

[I Have Questions]

Does the Afore deserve credit for exercising restraint? I.e., by *not* announcing that he ate? Well, there is a difference between telling the whole wide world *that* you ate, versus admitting to *what* you actually ate. And omitting both? That is another, very telling admission.

We win again, in other words.

He does now seem to be between a rock and a hard place. On this recent trip to England he has eaten well, and has done so (mostly) for free. So perhaps there isn’t the perceived mileage in the sarcastic posting about what he ate on this trip, when doing so would just serve to reinforce the point being made.