Nuclear Catholics and Other Essays:
O'Brien, Dennis
The sin of malign Iorgetfillness This is a very good book with a very bad title. "Nuclear" attached to "Catholic" in this instance has nothing to do with central Catholic values but with folk like...
...The first-on fashionable sexual propaganda-is one which he now believes to be rather too "brisk," but it follows nonetheless from his marvelously sensitive and subtle analysis of "poetry and dialectic" which concludes the volume...
...It would seem that the basic argument of the sexual liberationist is that there is nothing wrong with any sexual behavior "but thinking makes it so...
...Cameron, professor emeritus at St...
...The essay is appropriately titled "Sex in the Head...
...One might get the impression that contemporary thought lacks moral content...
...Newman and Cameron are both Catholic and liberal-a stance not much appreciated by either camp alone.her camp alone...
...And how is mind embodied...
...Cameron dispatches such arguments with wit and grace...
...Cameron Eerdman's, $21.95, 261 pp...
...Dennis O'Brien a now familiar modern philosophical argument against private language...
...At the conclusion of his favorable (but critical) analysis of Michael and Unjust Wars, Cameron says that the book is "a powerful remedy for the malign forgetfulness from which we suffer...
...He is incredulous at Rosemary Ruether's "mean view" of the past...
...One might approach the underlying principle of all of Cameron's arguments by reading the first and the last essays together...
...Cameron's moral sense lies deeper than denunciation...
...This seemingly esoteric argument (originating with Wittgenstein) is finally aimed at "pri-vatism" in all its forms and ramifications...
...Commenting on Nancy Friday's view that sexual fantasy is a badge of women's liberation, Cameron remarks, "it doesn't seem to worry her that...[t]here are fantasies of rape, beating, violation by dogs...
...Cameron shows clearly the absurdity of private language in general and goes on to defend poetry as the public vehicle by which we understand (at least in part) our own emotions and share the emotions of others...
...Victorianism may be her watchword of neurotic depression, but Cameron reminds us that the nineteenth century was one of the great centuries of Western civilization...
...Our emotions are fancied to be some sort of ineffable inner sensations which are of inestimable value to us but totally incommunicable to others...
...Humanity emerges into history and dies from forgetfulness...
...If mind is embodied, having cheery thoughts during intercourse with a statue will not be the sole measure of value...
...True enough, but that can be as misleading as the atomic title...
...The notion that the human mind is embodied, and that the body (and the talk about the body and its business) is not a mere bystander to inner sense, lies behind Cameron's dissection of sexual liberation...
...The publisher's blurb credits Cameron with sound application of moral principle to his range of subjects...
...Others are merely careless...
...The essay on poetry rests ultimately on NUCLEAR CATHOLICS AND OTHER ESSAYS J.M...
...In ritual, gesture, poetry, culture-in history...
...Nuclear" attached to "Catholic" in this instance has nothing to do with central Catholic values but with folk like Michael Novak who think that one can fashion a moral argument for a nuclear deterrent (even though Novak thinks it quite immoral to ever use such a deterrent...
...In sex, anything goes provided one has cheery thoughts...
...He sums up the argument as follows: "Talk about the inner life is always in terms of concepts made by us as embodied intelligences, not as intelligences contingently and-as has been thought-by misfortune connected to the bodies that we happen to have...
...On the contrary, contemporary thought bristles with moral denunciation...
...Cameron has no patience with ahistorical moral righteousness...
...intercourse with statues...
...Tripp's The Homosexual Matrix repeats the claim that the Council of Macon debated whether women were human beings...
...He concludes: "The sadness and triviality of this book are almost unbearable...
...It is the sin of malign forgetfulness that Cameron lays against the age...
...On the other hand, Nuclear (core) Catholic would be a very good title for what may at first appear a disparate collection of essays covering everything from the sexual revolution to Charles Dickens on angels...
...Among the victims of privatism has been human emotional life...
...Humane action sketches itself in history, in the historical inheritance of language, in our shared stories of love and betrayal...
...Sexual revolutionists drop moral bombshells all over the civilized landscape-often taking special aim on churches and other traditional mor-alizing institutions like the family...
...Morality-sexual or otherwise-is not something made up inside one's head by positive feelings...
...Michael's College, University of Toronto, has given us what philosophers are supposed to deliver: wisdom-and in my judgment, it is wisdom specially formed by a Catholic sense...
...A reference to Migne would show that one bishop raised the issue, the rest of them set him right...
...It is this deep sense of the givenness of history, the grace of past poetry, that makes me link Cameron to the Catholic sense of Newman-whose delicate balance between pietas toward the past and the novel problems of the present is the subject of the essay, "Newman, the Liberal...
Vol. 117 • April 1990 • No. 7
