#hanby

“Joy is unintelligible apart from the enduring embrace of love; indeed it is the fruit of this embrace. Love, as simultaneous self-gift and desire, is only intelligible as moved by goodness, and the very act, in loving, in simultaneously desiring and giving, affirms the independent goodness of the beloved and allows the beloved simply to be unto itself, precisely in being embraced. So joy, as the fruit of love, performs a judgment about the world beyond the lover, and yet this judgment can only be true, the beloved can only genuinely be good, if indeed it mediates a goodness and reveals a beauty that transcends it, that is, if it is itself the fruit of a love which in loving, bestows diffusive goodness upon it in its very specificity. Both love and joy presuppose the prior claims of beauty and goodness, and the reality of finite beauty and goodness are finally dependent upon a higher love not our own. Love and joy by their very act and existence make a radical ontological affirmation, and yet this affirmation is finally only intelligible if the world is created in the Father’s loving delight for the Son. It is in fact the Father’s judgment upon the world in the kenotic sending of the Son, his letting be of the Son as creature subject to death, and his raising of Christ, transfigured, that finally completes the judgment of Genesis inaugurating the eternal sabbath of the eighth day: it is very good.”

“Boredom, by contrast, names a twofold failure of an altogether different kind: a failure of the world to be compelling to a subject ostensibly entitled to such an expectation and a failure or incapacity on the part of the subject to be compelled. In this, boredom is closely aligned with hopelessness, and there may indeed be a more profound relation between the excesses of consumer society and the sense of helplessness that leads an increasing number of citizens of that same society to despair of social and political involvement. It is this double nullity of both subject and world, I contend, that underlies entertainment culture and the numbing array of cultural choices produced by it. 

The very notion of entertainment presumes the state of boredom as the norm, which means that a culture increasingly fueled by this notion assumes that our lives are innately and intrinsically meaningless without the constant stream of “stimulation” and distraction, a stream inevitably subject to the law of diminishing returns. This nullity on the side of the subject is matched by a similar noughting in the world, for latent in this assumption is a corollary denial of form, objective beauty, or a true order of goods that naturally and of themselves compels our interest. As a consequence, according to this cultural logic, all such choices can only be indifferently related to one another. None is intrinsically good or bad, and indeed no good approaches that of choice itself. Hence most citizens of the modern West, almost of necessity, live lives of profound fragmentation and internal contradiction, and yet these contradictions too frequently make no real competing claims on lives and loyalties and cause little pain or anguish to those who are subject to them. Yet the effect of many of these choices is less to please than to stupefy, anesthetize or distract us from the failed festivals, broken communities, and otherwise empty existence imposed by a formless goalless world.”