tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21453673895279801512024-02-20T04:39:16.559-06:00Irenist's marginalia"I would encourage all people of good will who are active in the emerging environment of digital communication to commit themselves to promoting a culture of <i>respect, dialogue</i> and <i>friendship.</i>"
<br>
-- Pope Benedict XVIUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger105125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-42298410454093723742020-04-06T13:03:00.000-05:002020-04-06T15:03:05.878-05:00Some marginalia on the first four sections of the first book of the Ethica NicomacheaThese very rough notes are a somewhat expanded transcription of handwritten marginalia I set down for my own use. They are tentative, often inchoate, impressionistic, and speculative musings, rather than theses to defend. The focus throughout is on quarrying material useful for my own reflections on contemporary Catholic integralism. If the reader finds them useful, too, in some very small way, then so much the better.<br />
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[1094a1--The Bekker numbers in brackets are approximate--I was going to look them up and specifiy them more precisely, but honestly I can't be bothered.]<br />
<br />
Politics is the "most authoritative art, and indeed the master art" (κυριωτάτης καὶ μάλιστα ἀρχιτεκτονικῆς). Note the Greek here: κυριωτάτης, reminiscent of "lordly" (compare "Κύριε ἐλέησον" or "κύριος Ἰησοῦς") and μάλιστα ἀρχιτεκτονικῆς, "most architectonic" (compare Mark 6:3, "οὐκ οὗτος ἐστιν ὁ τέκτων, ὁ υἱὸς τῆς Μαρίας?" [Isn't this the Carpenter (ὁ τέκτων), the Son of Mary?"]). Taking admittedly unwarranted liberties with the text, we might say:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Politics is the Lord's art, the Maker's art. </blockquote>
Aristotle has just begun his discussion, and already whispering between the lines of the Greek we find not only the connection between politics and God in some general, Deist sense, but a politics always already haunted by a very specific God--the Lord, the Carpenter.<br />
<br />
[1094a1]<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[P]olitics... (πολιτικὴ) ordains which of the sciences should be studied in a state (πόλις), and which each class of citizens should learn and up to what point they should learn them . . . .</blockquote>
This is the reason why politics is "the most authoritative art and that which is the master art." Moreover, this means that, rightly understood, politics <i>just is </i>integralism, and integralism<i> just is</i> politics. Politics orders our education. But education orders our souls--rightly or wrongly, depending upon what is taught, how, and by whom.<br />
<br />
[1094b1]<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Since... [politics] legislates as to what we are to do and what we are to abstain from, the end (τέλος) of this science must include those of the others, so that this end must be the good for man. For even if the end is the same for a single man and for a πόλις, that of the πόλις seems at all events something greater both to attain and to preserve; for though it is worthwhile to attain the τέλος merely for one man, it is finer and more godlike (θειότερον) to attain it for a nation or a state (ἔθνει καὶ πόλεσιν).</blockquote>
Here, of course, we already have the superiority of the "common good" over that of the individual person insisted upon by Charles De Koninck.<br />
<br />
Perhaps more surprisingly, here we also have not merely πόλις, but ἔθνος. So although a certain cosmopolitanism is doubtless demanded by the catholicity of the Church, we find in the order of nature as described by the Philosopher a place for the common good of an ἔθνος. Perhaps one wishing to protect the common good of an ἔθνος (nation) might be called a "national conservative." It may be doubted whether any national patriotism ought to survive in the order of grace, where there is "neither Jew nor Greek." But since grace perfects nature, it would seem that the City of Man may have its nations. just as the City of God, even, has not merely its clerics, but its laymen, too.<br />
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<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[1094b1]</span></div>
<div>
Here we are told that politics doesn't admit of mathematical precision. Aristotle gives us Burkean humanism, not Marxian economism. The attempt to substitute mathematics for prudence in modern political economy is folly.<br />
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[1095a1] Here we are told that the "young and rash" don't benefit from instruction in politics. The young lack the knowledge that comes from experience. The rash fail to benefit from knowledge, like the morally incontinent. A possible implication would be that neither the young nor felons (who have proven themselves rash) should enjoy the franchise.<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We must begin with what is familiar to us. Hence any one who is to listen intelligently to lectures about what is noble and just and generally, about the subject of political science, must be brought up in good habits. [1095b1]</blockquote>
First note that the "noble and just" are "the subject of political science." This has direct application for whether Catholic Social Teaching is an authoritative teaching on faith and morals: the "noble and just" are moral matters. If politics <i>just is</i> a quest for the noble and just, then it is necessarily within the purview of the Magisterium.<br />
<br />
Second, note that education--<i>viz</i>., a virtuous upbringing--is indispensable to right political deliberation. (Virtue ethics is premised upon the importance of habit. We must continually cultivate virtue, which is a characterological condition, not an evaluation of discrete acts.) Two caveats: 1. Some few are able to reform and acquire some of this education of their moral sentiments in later life after a bad upbringing. 2. This education is not a matter of some gnostic technocratic meritocracy--it is a matter of the cultivation of virtue. In that regard, most of our present elite of "merit" is very maleducated indeed.<br />
<br />
<br />
[1095b1] Here, we are told that there are three types of life--the life of pleasure, the political life, and the contemplative life. The "life of pleasure" looks suspiciously like the sinful life of the prodigal. Then the latter look like the lives of laymen and vowed religious, respectively. But to leave it there is too bourgeois-republican and Protestant (but I repeat myself) a view. Aristotle also gives us this Dalrymplean sentiment here:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Now the mass of mankind are evidently quite slavish in their tastes, preferring a life suitable to beasts. </blockquote>
<br />
So consider the philosophers, warriors, and producers in Plato's <i>Republic</i>, corresponding to the intellect, will, and appetite in the soul. Nietzsche was right in some ways when he called Christianity "Platonism for the masses." And the three estates of medieval society--clergy, nobility, and commons--gave the world a practical Platonic republic, presided over by the Philosopher-King in Rome.<br />
<br />
Aristotle's "mass of men" here are the farmers and mechanics, and perhaps the merchants as well. Experience tells us that most men do prefer low entertainments, junk food, and vice. The Tao Te Ching tells us to keep the peasant masses fed but ignorant. Mencius tells us every man is innately good. The sane middle ground is to acknowledge original sin, but strive to cultivate virtue. Plato emphasizes the productive mass's need for temperance. Jeffersonian democracy tried to create a temperate republic. It was succeeded by Jacksonian democracy, which more often let the demos run riot. Perhaps the mass of men are innately--viz., genetically--such. Perhaps education in virtue, tutelage by the Church, can indeed bring Platonic temperance to the masses. Reality is likely a mix of both--the Church ever striving to broaden and deepen the virtue of the mass of men, and succeeding in making sturdy yeoman saints some of the time, and failing with other men.<br />
<br />
Because the Church will not make every man a saint--to think otherwise is utopianism--there will always be not only contemplation for our philosopher-king clergy, and politics for men educated into habits of virtue enough that they deliberate aright, but a <i>massa damnata</i> of poor in faith we shall always have with us, living a life of pleasure. For them, the statesman can and should take Lao Tzu's advice--leave them to their folly, and don't try to make New Soviet Men of them. But for the Church, such men--and they are not at all limited to the stupid or the penniless--are a continual mission field. We cannot hope on this side of purgatory to bring every man to virtue--perhaps least of all me--but we strive nonetheless to fulfill Our Lord's Commission. If we do not make allowance for the existence of this group whom I'll call (with the Heraclitean distinction between wet and dry souls in mind) the <i>massa inebriata </i>(who will ever choose moonshine and sloth over temperance and uplift), then we are in a continual cycle of Protestant Reform, oscillating between Roundheads and Jacobins and Red Guards, and then Jacksonians and Restoration rakes and an amoral commercial republic of consumers, over and over again. Every deviation from a mixed polity has its characteristic failure modes. Democratical polity degenerates into ochlocratic democracy, and then into tyranny. The Roundhead congregationalist and the democratic republican (but I repeat myself) make no allowances for the fact that not every man in the masses will be a Praise-God Barebone or a Stakhanov. So their Jeffersonian politics is like universalist theology--it ignores reality, and runs into madness.<br />
<br />
A proper polity will balance the three estates, and so keep the pleasure-seeking of the masses politically in check. In our time, the soldiery isn't a proper estate anymore, and we see that fascism has failed, running into hideous follies of its own by letting not the serf, but the soldier run riot. Moreover, any Ibero-fascist vision of a state of humble producers, Spartan soldiers, and Catholic priests is a foolish utopianism of its own for us, not least because of changed material conditions from not only the agrarian city states of Plato's and Aristotle's time, but from the societies transitioning from farming to Fordism that embraced fascism.<br />
<br />
Against the utopian urge to immanentize the eschaton, I would propose an oddball mixture of Dorothy Day and Michael Oakeshott: <i>Think apocalyptically; act incrementally.</i> Through attempts to re-integrate religion into public life, and to make some men more fit for political deliberation, we can attempt to forge a mixed polity from within our consumerist ochlocracy, by incrementally adding more of the contemplative and the truly political--the noble and the just--to today's pleasure-seeking Anglo-American liberal democratic republic.<br />
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[1095b1] Here we are told that honor is "roughly speaking, the τέλος of politics." Again, we see that while a Gelasian dyarchy presiding over three estates concerns us all, the "political life" is neither the life of the <i>massa inebriata</i>, nor specifically that of the contemplative clergy, but most properly that of the will to the noble and just, the warrior guardians standing between the philosopher kings and the idiocy of the crowd. The restriction of the franchise (or at least the franchise for some upper house) to men who've served in the military--Heinlein's old chestnut--is perhaps implied by this. However, the illusion that the soldiery--either the fascist thugs of yore or the PowerPoint jockeys of today--is free from vice is itself a dangerous one. Indeed, the old Tory preference for the militia over the military, perhaps an indirect ancestor of the Second Amendment of our admittedly Whiggish Constitution, is probably a better seed for further reflection here than a jejune utopia of starship fascists.<br />
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Irenisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16870614125489778250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-74745340005778846872015-12-24T09:21:00.002-06:002015-12-24T09:21:56.450-06:00Divine Poverty, Divine HelplessnessWe have a newborn at home. I've been thinking a lot about Dr. Harvey Karp's idea of the<br />
"<a href="http://www.coliccalm.com/baby_infant_newborn_articles/4th-trimester-theory.htm">fourth trimester</a>": the brain cannot complete its development prior to birth, because if it did, the baby's head wouldn't fit through the birth canal. Or, <a href="http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/why-humans-give-birth-to-helpless-babies/">alternatively</a>, according to some researchers, because human brain development needs to occur in the context of hearing speech and observing the environment. In either case, human infants are <a href="http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/why-is-human-childbirth-so-painful">uniquely helpless</a> among mammals: a newborn foal, for instance, will start walking within hours, whereas for neurological reasons, a newborn human <a href="http://www.livescience.com/9760-study-reveals-infants-walk.html">cannot</a>.<br />
<br />
God, on the other hand is <a href="http://corinquietam.blogspot.com/2012/08/st-thomas-of-aquinas-on-gods.html">omnipotent</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impassibility">impassible</a>, and characterized by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aseity">aseity</a>: almighty, not prone to harm or suffering of any kind, and utterly, utterly independent. God as He Is in Himself could not suffer, and could not die. To suffer and die for us, <a href="http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02035a.htm">St. Athanasius</a> explains in his classic <i><a href="http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/athanasius/incarnation/incarnation.c.htm">On the Incarnation</a></i>, God had to take mortal flesh. Only we mortals can suffer and die.<br />
<br />
At the nativity, God Almighty was born as a "fourth trimester" human infant: the most helpless of all the mammals. From limitless power, invulnerability to suffering, and complete independence, Our Creator was born a tiny creature powerless, oh so fragile, and completely, helplessly dependent upon His Mother.<br />
<br />
The Third Joyful <a href="http://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/prayers-and-devotions/rosaries/how-to-pray-the-rosary.cfm">Mystery</a> of the Rosary is the Nativity, in which we pray for the virtue of being <a href="http://www.scripturalrosary.org/nativity.html">Poor in Spirit</a>. And what greater poverty of spirit could there be than this--to surrender power over for the whole whirling cosmos for powerlessness, to surrender invulnerability for fragility, to surrender painlessness for pain, to surrender independence for helplessness, to surrender the form of God to put on the form of a slave?<br />
<br />
Christ told the rich young man to give away all he had to the poor. This was no idle bit of sanctimony. Jesus Christ, God in suffering flesh, knows more than any of us can ever fathom what it is to have all the cosmos, and surrender it all. To give away infinite riches, and be poor and helpless as only a human infant can be. He did this. For you. Merry Christmas!Irenisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16870614125489778250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-46957569928638174192015-12-15T10:29:00.003-06:002015-12-15T10:49:05.684-06:00Neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire: Disqus.I'm trying out Disqus comments, since the lack of subthreading in typical Blogger comments strikes me as an obstacle to the potential for good conversation.<br />
<br />
It would appear that no one's avatar from the old comments I imported survived unscathed--including even my own. Instead, all of us have had our avatars in the pre-Disqus transition comments replaced by the "default" avatar I selected for commenters without Disqus accounts. Sorry about that. I hope for those of you already using Disqus accounts that the system will recognize them going forward.<br />
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(In case you're interested: that <a href="http://www.historyireland.com/medieval-history-pre-1500/giraldus-cambrensiss-view-of-europe/">default image is of a scribe</a> I imagine to be writing marginalia of his own, and in keeping with the "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KellsFol032vChristEnthroned.jpg">Christ Enthroned</a> from the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Kells">Book of Kells</a>" background theme of the desktop version of this blog, the image is taken from a manuscript of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_of_Wales">Giraldus Cambrensis'</a> <span class="irc_su" dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topographia_Hibernica"><i>Topographia Hibernica</i></a>.)</span><br />
<br />
<span class="irc_su" dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;">If you do happen to comment here or on any other post, I'd be grateful to know if the Disqus system is causing any aggravation. If it's a pain, I'll scrap it. Thanks. </span><br />
<span class="irc_su" dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;"><br /></span>
<span class="irc_su" dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;"><br /></span>Irenisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16870614125489778250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-54858298846562085712015-12-13T11:40:00.001-06:002015-12-13T11:56:54.715-06:00Burning zeal--but not for God's House<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>When it was almost time for the Jewish Passover, Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!” His disciples remembered that it is written: “Zeal for your house will consume me.” --</i>John 2:13-17</blockquote>
In a recent <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/what-cardinal-dolan-knew-miqueli/">thread</a> on a (thankfully unrelated) Catholic clergy sex scandal, Rod Dreher had occasion to comment regarding the pederasty scandals that:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
One of the enduring mysteries of the sex abuse scandal is why some men in these parishes — cousins of the abuse victims, somebody — didn’t take these pervert priests out and teach them a hard lesson. I’m not remotely a tough buy, but anybody who harmed one of my kids in that way would count themselves fortunate if they weren’t permanently crippled by what I would do to them.</blockquote>
<a href="http://www.truthaccordingtoscripture.com/documents/apologetics/mere-christianity/Book3/cs-lewis-mere-christianity-book3.php#.Vm2iNXarSUk">I am just the same.</a><br />
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<a name='more'></a><br />
If anyone, clerical or lay, were to rape any member of my family, I would with difficulty restrain myself from inflicting upon him punishments that would make look like comparative spa treatments both the fires of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-da-f%C3%A9">auto-da-fé</a> of the Catholic Inquisition, and indeed the even grislier punishment of being <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanged,_drawn_and_quartered">hanged, drawn, and quartered</a> as a "traitor" for the "crime" of being a Catholic priest during the <a href="http://www.historyextra.com/article/elizabeth-i/elizabeth-i%E2%80%99s-war-england%E2%80%99s-catholics">Tudor Terror</a>.<br />
<br />
Now, I hope I would restrain myself. First, and far less importantly for reasons of prudence: under our modern criminal justice regime, which quite sensibly frowns on vigilantism and clan feuds, I would be jailed for torturing a pederast or rapist to death; my my family needs a father and husband much more than it needs an avenger rotting away in jail. Second, and far more importantly, because such violent personal retribution would be unchristian: forgiveness and mercy are at the core of Christ's martyred witness, criminal penalties are work for the sword of Caesar, and avenging hellfire is the Lord's alone.<br />
<br />
Because of this last reason--because torture and cruelty are unchristian--we rightly judge the Catholic Inquisition and the Anglican (and, briefly, Marian) Tudor Terror alike to fall short of Christian justice, Christian charity, and Christian mercy. So the Inquisitors, and all the other heretic hunters of Tudor Britain and Ireland, or Calvin's Geneva, failed as Christians insofar as they countenanced such grisly barbarities. (As indeed did even the sainted martyr Sir Thomas More, when it was Protestants being burnt, rather than Catholics.)<br />
<br />
So they failed as Christians insofar as they were violent persecutors of others' (ir)religion. But I am in no position to judge them, or to judge the like horrors of ISIS or the Wahhabist beheaders of Saudi Arabia, or in any position to reprove self-righteously the Biblical praise of the <a href="http://reknew.org/2013/03/the-phinehas-vs-jesus-conundrum/">murderous zeal of Phinehas</a> as aped by crusaders, conquistadors or Cromwell.<br />
<br />
Why? Not only because of the general admonition to "judge not"--when was the last time a theological liberal admonished herself to forbear judging Torquemada, I wonder?--but because I would, if I legally could, rush to castrate and immolate anyone who raped a member of my family. Oh, I'd feel guilty afterward. I'd repent. But I'd probably do it.<br />
<br />
Now, as a product of our Lockean liberal republic and of our <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Secular_Age">secular age</a>, it's alien to me to imagine myself countenancing the infliction of the punishments of the Inquisition or the Tudor Terror, of ISIS or Calvin, on anyone for their (ir)religion. It's not just that I disapprove:<br />
<br />
<i>I wouldn't be at all tempted.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
But were some creep to hurt my family, it would take every resource of prayer and self-restraint I've got not to torture them to death. And Rod's comment indicates that in this, I am not (entirely) alone.<br />
<br />
To murder brutally some rapist or killer of my own kin, I would be sorely tempted. But to the punishment (as opposed to gentle persuasion) or heretics? It is no merit of mine not to burn heretics; I am not thus tempted:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Ever since I served as an infantryman in the first world war I have had a great dislike of people who, themselves in ease and safety, issue exhortations to men in the front line. As a result I have a reluctance to say much about temptations to which I myself am not exposed. No man, I suppose, is tempted to every sin. It so happens that the impulse which makes men gamble has been left out of my make-up; and, no doubt, I pay for this by lacking some good impulse of which it is the excess or perversion. </blockquote>
--C.S. Lewis, <i>Mere Christianity</i>, preface.<br />
<br />
Just so here. I am not exposed to the inquisitor's temptations, so I ought issue no preening advice that the inquisitor or ISIS jihadi ought to learn to learn to "<a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/coexistence/">coexist</a>." Not that he oughtn't, but just that I, personally, am in no position to advise him about how to conquer a vice--"intolerance"--to which I am far too secular in my American bones to find even slightly tempting.<br />
<br />
Not tempted to gamble, Lewis says he must pay for this with the lack of some good impulse. Which brings me to my second point, beyond the mere not-judging of the inquisitors of old. <br />
<br />
What is the corresponding virtue that Phinehas had, that Torquemada had? <br />
<br />
<i>What virtue was incarnated by Our Lord when zeal for his Father's House consumed Him?</i><br />
<br />
On reflection, it would seem that the fires of the Inquisition were kindled by an excess of piety. If there can even be such a thing! Perhaps one might better say a misdirection.<br />
<br />
In any case, if I castrate my daughter's rapist, or burn alive my son's murderer, then I torture and kill out of an excess of love for other human beings. But the Inquisitor tortured and killed out of an excess zeal for the things of God. So who is the worse sinner?<br />
<br />
That the fires of the Inquisition no longer burn is to be celebrated. But that we are no longer tempted to them? What does that indicate? Do our hearts no longer burn within us with zeal for the honor of God?<br />
<br />
<i>Have our secular hearts grown cold?</i><br />
<br />
What virtue do we lose in not being tempted to the Inquisitor's vice?<br />
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<br />Irenisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16870614125489778250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-25612425649941215812015-12-11T16:06:00.002-06:002015-12-11T16:12:14.485-06:00Steel Rule of St. Benedict<div class="tr_bq" style="text-align: center;">
{Content warning: This post is ridiculously long.}</div>
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Today, let's mash up the <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/benedict-option-faq/">Benedict Option</a> (BenOpt) Dark Ages and the <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/03/reactionary-philosophy-in-an-enormous-planet-sized-nutshell/">neoreactionary</a> (NRx) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment">Dark Enlightenment</a> (DE). <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/">Not </a>that I'm a fan of the DE: I'm not at all a "theonomist" in my traditionalism, but this NRx admission rings true to me: <a href="http://www.xenosystems.net/neoreaction-for-dummies/">When theonomists scrutinize ethno-nationalists and techno-commercialists they see evil heathens.</a> That's about it. But let's compare notes anyway, and see what spoils we can cart away from Egypt, for as St. Augustine advises, "whatever has been rightly said by the heathen," even the evil heathen, "we must appropriate to our uses": </div>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For, as the Egyptians had not only the idols and heavy burdens which the people of Israel hated and fled from, but also vessels and ornaments of gold and silver, and garments, which the same people when going out of Egypt appropriated to themselves, designing them for a better use, not doing this on their own authority, but by the command of God, the Egyptians themselves, in their ignorance, providing them with things which they themselves were not making a good use of; in the same way all branches of heathen learning have not only false and superstitious fancies and heavy burdens of unnecessary toil, which every one of us, when going out under the leadership of Christ from the fellowship of the heathen, ought to abhor and avoid; but they contain also liberal instruction which is better adapted to the use of the truth, and some most excellent precepts of morality; and some truths in regard even to the worship of the One God are found among them. Now these are, so to speak, their gold and silver, which they did not create themselves, but dug out of the mines of God's providence which are everywhere scattered abroad, and are perversely and unlawfully prostituting to the worship of devils. These, therefore, the Christian, when he separates himself in spirit from the miserable fellowship of these men, ought to take away from them, and to devote to their proper use in preaching the gospel. Their garments, also,--that is, human institutions such as are adapted to that intercourse with men which is indispensable in this life,--we must take and turn to a Christian use.</blockquote>
–<i>De Doctrina Christiana</i>, II, xl.<br />
<br />
So, first, where are we Catholic trads coming from as we slog through our culture's descent into a decadent dark age? Well, here's the BenOp urtext:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead often not recognizing fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St Benedict.</blockquote>
Alasdair MacIntyre, <i>After Virtue</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
So, our hopes are not in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_(Negri_and_Hardt_book)">Empire</a> anymore. And neither are those of NRx blogfather <a href="http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/">Mencius Moldbug</a>. Instead of political participation <i>of any kind</i>, Moldbug advocates a <a href="http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.ca/2009/09/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html">Steel Rule</a> of <a href="http://thefutureprimaeval.net/passivism-and-the-procedure/">Passivism</a> as demanding in its limited way as the vows of poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability demanded by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_Saint_Benedict">Rule of St. Benedict</a>. NRxer <a href="http://thefutureprimaeval.net/author/warg/">Warg Franklin</a> <a href="http://thefutureprimaeval.net/passivism-and-the-procedure/">introduces</a> Moldbug's turning away into Passivism in the context of Moldbug's tripartite Procedure for accepting (not seizing, <i>accepting</i>) power:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In his <a href="http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.ca/2009/09/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html">Gentle Introduction, Part 9a</a>, Mencius Moldbug introduces a neat little political methodology he calls "Passivism", and a Procedure to replace the current political machinery, which rots evilly in the Potomac swamp and stinks up this entire half of the world, with some shining and efficient New Structure fit for the 21st century....<br />
The core of The Procedure is a three step general purpose program for solving problems of inadequate or rogue political machinery:<br />
<ol>
<li>Become Worthy</li>
<li>Accept Power</li>
<li>Rule</li>
</ol>
It sounds facetious. It's not. Let's unpack.</blockquote>
<br />
Yes. Let's.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Step One, "Become Worthy", means that you prepare yourself and organize your friends so that if some higher power, for example an earthquake or political crisis, dissolved the current system and put you in charge, you could pick up the pieces and govern justly and effectively. That is, becoming worthy means building contingency in case the current structure fails and you have to provide your own government services, or to fill in the existing gaps in its service. Ideally, "worthy" means "obviously 10x more competent than the current structure". You should probably have a solid governance plan, a well constructed and efficient organization, high-quality people, a more trustworthy source of information, more reliable and useful community infrastructure, demonstrated success, etc.</blockquote>
This is the core of my comparison here. I propose that as the Roman Empire slowly collapsed, it was the Christian Church that "became worthy" in just this way. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism">Distributist</a> man of letters <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilaire_Belloc">Hilaire Belloc</a> describes what I mean in a an entire chapter of one of his books, which I am going to quote almost in its entirety, both because it is out of copyright (Praise God!) and because it is <i>important</i>, darn it:<br />
<br />
<i><a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8442/pg8442.html">Europe and the Faith</a></i>, Chapter II:<br />
<br />
WHAT WAS THE CHURCH IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE?<br />
<br />
So far I have attempted to answer the question, "What Was the Roman Empire?" We have seen that it was an institution of such and such a character, but to this we had to add that it was an institution affected from its origin, and at last permeated by, another institution. This other institution had (and has) for its name "The Catholic Church."<br />
<br />
My next task must, therefore, be an attempt to answer the question, "What was the Church in the Roman Empire?" for that I have not yet touched.<br />
<br />
In order to answer this question we shall do well to put ourselves in the place of a man living in a particular period, from whose standpoint the nature of the connection between the Church and the Empire can best be observed. And that standpoint in time is the generation which lived through the close of the second century and on into the latter half of the third century: say from A.D. 190 to A.D. 270. It is the first moment in which we can perceive the Church as a developed organism now apparent to all.<br />
<br />
If we take an earlier date we find ourselves in a world where the growing Church was still but slightly known and by most people unheard of. We can get no earlier view of it as part of the society around it. It is from about this time also that many documents survive. I shall show that the appearance of the Church at this time, from one hundred and fifty to two hundred and forty years after the Crucifixion, is ample evidence of her original constitution.<br />
<br />
A man born shortly after the reign of Marcus Aurelius, living through the violent civil wars that succeeded the peace of the Antonines, surviving to witness the Decian persecution of the Church and in extreme old age to perceive the promise, though not the establishment, of an untrammelled Catholicism (it had yet to pass through the last and most terrible of the persecutions), would have been able to answer our question well. He would have lived at the turn of the tide: a witness to the emergence, apparent to all Society, of the Catholic Church.<br />
<br />
Let us suppose him the head of a Senatorial family in some great provincial town such as Lyons. He would then find himself one of a comparatively small class of very wealthy men to whom was confined the municipal government of the city. Beneath him he would be accustomed to a large class of citizens, free men but not senatorial; beneath these again his society reposed upon a very large body of slaves....<br />
<br />
Let us imagine such a man going through the streets of Lyons of a morning to attend a meeting of the Curia. He would salute, and be saluted, as he passed, by many men of the various classes I have described. Some, though slaves, he would greet familiarly; others, though nominally free and belonging to his own following or to that of some friend, he would regard with less attention. He would be accompanied, it may be presumed, by a small retinue, some of whom might be freed men of his own, some slaves, some of the tenant class, some in legal theory quite independent of him, and yet by the economic necessities of the moment practically his dependents.<br />
<br />
As he passes through the streets he notes the temples dedicated to a variety of services. No creed dominated the city; even the local gods were now but a confused memory; a religious ritual of the official type was to greet him upon his entry to the Assembly, but in the public life of the city no fixed philosophy, no general faith, appeared.<br />
<br />
Among the many buildings so dedicated, two perhaps would have struck his attention: the one the great and showy synagogue where the local Jews met upon their Sabbath, the other a small Christian Church. The first of these he would look on as one looks today upon the mark of an alien colony in some great modern city. He knew it to be the symbol of a small, reserved, unsympathetic but wealthy race scattered throughout the Empire. The Empire had had trouble with it in the past, but that trouble was long forgotten; the little colonies of Jews had become negotiators, highly separate from their fellow citizens, already unpopular, but nothing more.<br />
<br />
With the Christian Church it would be otherwise. He would know as an administrator (we will suppose him a pagan) that this Church was endowed; that it was possessed of property more or less legally guaranteed. It had a very definite position of its own among the congregations and corporations of the city, peculiar, and yet well secured. He would further know as an administrator (and this would more concern him—for the possession of property by so important a body would seem natural enough), that to this building and the corporation of which it was a symbol were attached an appreciable number of his fellow citizens; a small minority, of course, in any town of such a date (the first generation of the third century), but a minority most appreciable and most worthy of his concern from three very definite characteristics. In the first place it was certainly growing; in the second place it was certainly, even after so many generations of growth, a phenomenon perpetually novel; in the third place (and this was the capital point) it represented a true political organism—the only subsidiary organism which had risen within the general body of the Empire.<br />
<br />
If the reader will retain no other one of the points I am making in this description, let him retain this point: it is, from the historical point of view, the explanation of all that was to follow. The Catholic Church in Lyons would have been for that Senator a distinct organism; with its own officers, its own peculiar spirit, its own type of vitality, which, if he were a wise man, he would know was certain to endure and to grow, and which even if he were but a superficial and unintelligent spectator, he would recognize as unique.<br />
<br />
Like a sort of little State the Catholic Church included all classes and kinds of men, and like the Empire itself, within which it was growing, it regarded all classes of its own members as subject to it within its own sphere. The senator, the tenant, the freed man, the slave, the soldier, in so far as they were members of this corporation, were equally bound to certain observances. Did they neglect these observances, the corporation would expel them or subject them to penalties of its own. He knew that though misunderstandings and fables existed with regard to this body, there was no social class in which its members had not propagated a knowledge of its customs. He knew (and it would disturb him to know) that its organization, though in no way admitted by law, and purely what we should call "voluntary," was strict and very formidable.<br />
<br />
Here in Lyons as elsewhere, it was under a monarchical head called by the Greek name of Episcopos. Greek was a language which the cultured knew and used throughout the western or Latin part of the Empire to which he belonged; the title would not, therefore, seem to him alien any more than would be the Greek title of Presbyter—the name of the official priests acting under this monarchical head of the organization—or than would the Greek title Diaconos, which title was attached to an order, just below the priests, which was comprised of the inferior officials of the clerical body.<br />
<br />
He knew that this particular cult, like the innumerable others that were represented by the various sacred buildings of the city, had its mysteries, its solemn ritual, and so forth, in which these, the officials of its body, might alone engage, and which the mass of the local "Christians"—for such was their popular name—attended as a congregation. But he would further know that this scheme of worship differed wholly from any other of the many observances round it by a certain fixity of definition. The Catholic Church was not an opinion, nor a fashion, nor a philosophy; it was not a theory nor a habit; it was a clearly delineated body corporate based on numerous exact doctrines, extremely jealous of its unity and of its precise definitions, and filled, as was no other body of men at that time, with passionate conviction.<br />
<br />
By this I do not mean that the Senator so walking to his official duties could not have recalled from among his own friends more than one who was attached to the Christian body in a negligent sort of way, perhaps by the influence of his wife, perhaps by a tradition inherited from his father: he would guess, and justly guess, that this rapidly growing body counted very many members who were indifferent and some, perhaps, who were ignorant of its full doctrine. But the body as a whole, in its general spirit, and especially in the disciplined organization of its hierarchy, did differ from everything round it in this double character of precision and conviction. There was no certitude left and no definite spirit or mental aim, no "dogma" (as we should say today) taken for granted in the Lyons of his time, save among the Christians.<br />
<br />
The pagan masses were attached, without definite religion, to a number of customs. In social morals they were guided by certain institutions, at the foundation of which were the Roman ideas of property in men, land and goods; patriotism, the bond of smaller societies, had long ago merged in the conception of a universal empire. This Christian Church alone represented a complete theory of life, to which men were attached, as they had hundreds of years before been attached to their local city, with its local gods and intense corporate local life.<br />
<br />
Without any doubt the presence of that Church and of what it stood for would have concerned our Senator. It was no longer negligible nor a thing to be only occasionally observed. It was a permanent force and, what is more, a State within the State.<br />
<br />
If he were like most of his kind in that generation the Catholic Church would have affected him as an irritant; its existence interfered with the general routine of public affairs. If he were, as a small minority even of the rich already were, in sympathy with it though not of it, it would still have concerned him. It was the only exceptional organism of his uniform time: and it was growing.<br />
<br />
This Senator goes into the Curia. He deals with the business of the day. It includes complaints upon certain assessments of the Imperial taxes. He consults the lists and sees there (it was the fundamental conception of the whole of that society) men drawn up in grades of importance exactly corresponding to the amount of freehold land which each possessed. He has to vote, perhaps, upon some question of local repairs, the making of some new street, or the establishment of some monument. Probably he hears of some local quarrel provoked (he is told) by the small, segregated Christian body, and he follows the police report upon it.<br />
<br />
He leaves the Curia for his own business and hears at home the accounts of his many farms, what deaths of slaves there have been, what has been the result of the harvest, what purchases of slaves or goods have been made, what difficulty there has been in recruiting among his tenantry for the army, and so forth. Such a man was concerned one way or another with perhaps a dozen large farming centres or villages, and had some thousands of human beings dependent upon him. In this domestic business he hardly comes across the Church at all. It was still in the towns. It was not yet rooted in the countryside.<br />
<br />
There might possibly, even at that distance from the frontiers, be rumors of some little incursion or other of barbarians; perhaps a few hundred fighting men, come from the outer Germanies, had taken refuge with a Roman garrison after suffering defeat at the hands of neighboring barbarians; or perhaps they were attempting to live by pillage in the neighborhood of the garrison and the soldiers had been called out against them. He might have, from the hands of a friend in that garrison, a letter brought to him officially by the imperial post, which was organized along all the great highways, telling him what had been done to the marauders or the suppliants; how, too, some had, after capture, been allotted land to till under conditions nearly servile, others, perhaps, forcibly recruited for the army. The news would never for a moment have suggested to him any coming danger to the society in which he lived.<br />
<br />
He would have passed from such affairs to recreations probably literary, and there would have been an end of his day.<br />
<br />
In such a day what we note as most exceptional is the aspect of the small Catholic body in a then pagan city, and we should remember, if we are to understand history, that by this time it was already the phenomenon which contemporaries were also beginning to note most carefully.<br />
<br />
That is a fair presentment of the manner in which a number of local affairs (including the Catholic Church in his city) would have struck such a man at such a time.<br />
<br />
If we use our knowledge to consider the Empire as a whole, we must observe certain other things in the landscape, touching the Church and the society around it, which a local view cannot give us. In the first place there had been in that society from time to time acute spasmodic friction breaking out between the Imperial power and this separate voluntary organism, the Catholic Church. The Church's partial secrecy, its high vitality, its claim to independent administration, were the superficial causes of this. Speaking as Catholics, we know that the ultimate causes were more profound. The conflict was a conflict between Jesus Christ with His great foundation on the one hand, and what Jesus Christ Himself had called "the world." But it is unhistorical to think of a "Pagan" world opposed to a "Christian" world at that time. The very conception of "a Pagan world" requires some external manifest Christian civilization against which to contrast it. There was none such, of course, for Rome in the first generation of the third century. The Church had around her a society in which education was very widely spread, intellectual curiosity very lively, a society largely skeptical, but interested to discover the right conduct of human life, and tasting now this opinion, now that, to see if it could discover a final solution.<br />
<br />
It was a society of such individual freedom that it is difficult to speak of its "luxury" or its "cruelty." A cruel man could be cruel in it without suffering the punishment which centuries of Christian training would render natural to our ideas. But a merciful man could be, and would be, merciful and would preach mercy, and would be generally applauded. It was a society in which there were many ascetics—whole schools of thought contemptuous of sensual pleasure—but a society distinguished from the Christian particularly in this, that at bottom it believed man to be sufficient to himself and all belief to be mere opinions.<br />
<br />
Here was the great antithesis between the Church and her surroundings. It is an antithesis which has been revived today. Today, outside the Catholic Church, there is no distinction between opinion and faith nor any idea that man is other than sufficient to himself.<br />
<br />
The Church did not, and does not, believe man to be sufficient to himself, nor naturally in possession of those keys which would open the doors to full knowledge or full social content. It proposed (and proposes) its doctrines to be held not as opinions but as a body of faith.<br />
<br />
It differed from—or was more solid than—all around it in this: that it proposed statement instead of hypothesis, affirmed concrete historical facts instead of suggesting myths, and treated its ritual of "mysteries" as realities instead of symbols.<br />
<br />
A word as to the constitution of the Church. All men with an historical training know that the Church of the years 200-250 was what I have described it, an organized society under bishops, and, what is more, it is evident that there was a central primacy at Rome as well as local primacies in various other great cities. But what is not so generally emphasized is the way in which Christian society appears to have looked at itself at that time.<br />
<br />
The conception which the Catholic Church had of itself in the early third century can, perhaps, best be approached by pointing out that if we use the word "Christianity" we are unhistorical. "Christianity" is a term in the mouth and upon the pen of the post-Reformation writer; it connotes an opinion or a theory; a point of view; an idea. The Christians of the time of which I speak had no such conception. Upon the contrary, they were attached to its very antithesis. They were attached to the conception of a thing: of an organized body instituted for a definite end, disciplined in a definite way, and remarkable for the possession of definite and concrete doctrine. One can talk, in speaking of the first three centuries, of stoic-ism, or epicurean-ism, or neoplaton-ism; but one cannot talk of "Christian-ism" or "Christ-ism." Indeed, no one has been so ignorant or unhistorical as to attempt those phrases. But the current phrase "Christianity," used by moderns as identical with the Christian body in the third century, is intellectually the equivalent of "Christianism" or "Christism;" and, I repeat, it connotes a grossly unhistorical idea; it connotes something historically false; something that never existed.<br />
<br />
Let me give an example of what I mean:<br />
<br />
Four men will be sitting as guests of a fifth in a private house in Carthage in the year 225. They are all men of culture; all possessed of the two languages, Greek and Latin, well-read and interested in the problems and half-solutions of their skeptical time. One will profess himself Materialist, and will find another to agree with him; there is no personal God, certain moral duties must be recognized by men for such and such utilitarian reasons, and so forth. He finds support.<br />
<br />
The host is not of that opinion; he has been profoundly influenced by certain "mysteries" into which he has been "initiated:" That is, symbolical plays showing the fate of the soul and performed in high seclusion before members of a society sworn to secrecy. He has come to feel a spiritual life as the natural life round him. He has curiously followed, and often paid at high expense, the services of necromancers; he believes that in an "initiation" which he experienced in his youth, and during the secret and most vivid drama or "mystery" in which he then took part, he actually came in contact with the spiritual world. Such men were not uncommon. The declining society of the time was already turning to influences of that type.<br />
<br />
The host's conviction, his awed and reticent attitude towards such things, impress his guests. One of the guests, however, a simple, solid kind of man, not drawn to such vagaries, says that he has been reading with great interest the literature of the Christians. He is in admiration of the traditional figure of the Founder of their Church. He quotes certain phrases, especially from the four orthodox Gospels. They move him to eloquence, and their poignancy and illuminative power have an effect upon his friends. He ends by saying: "For my part, I have come to make it a sort of rule to act as this Man Christ would have had me act. He seems to me to have led the most perfect life I ever read of, and the practical maxims which are attached to His Name seem to me a sufficient guide to life. That," he will conclude simply, "is the groove into which I have fallen, and I do not think I shall ever leave it."<br />
<br />
Let us call the man who has so spoken, Ferreolus. Would Ferreolus have been a Christian? Would the officials of the Roman Empire have called him a Christian? Would he have been in danger of unpopularity where Christians were unpopular? Would Christians have received him among themselves as part of their strict and still somewhat secret society? Would he have counted with any single man of the whole Empire as one of the Christian body?<br />
<br />
The answer is most emphatically No.<br />
<br />
No Christian in the first three centuries would have held such a man as coming within his view. No imperial officer in the most violent crisis of one of those spasmodic persecutions which the Church had to undergo would have troubled him with a single question. No Christian congregation would have regarded him as in any way connected with their body. Opinion of that sort, "Christism," had no relation to the Church. How far it existed we cannot tell, for it was unimportant. In so far as it existed it would have been on all fours with any one of the vague opinions which floated about the cultured Roman world.<br />
<br />
Now it is evident that the term "Christianity" used as a point of view, a mere mental attitude, would include such a man, and it is equally evident that we have only to imagine him to see that he had nothing to do with the Christian religion of that day. For the Christian religion (then as now) was a thing, not a theory. It was expressed in what I have called an organism, and that organism was the Catholic Church.<br />
<br />
The reader may here object: "But surely there was heresy after heresy and thousands of men were at any moment claiming the name of Christian whom the orthodox Church rejected. Nay, some suffered martyrdom rather than relinquish the name."<br />
<br />
True; but the very existence of such sects should be enough to prove the point at issue.<br />
<br />
These sects arose precisely because within the Catholic Church (1) exact doctrine, (2) unbroken tradition, and (3) absolute unity, were, all three, regarded as the necessary marks of the institution. The heresies arose one after another, from the action of men who were prepared to define yet more punctiliously what the truth might be, and to claim with yet more particular insistence the possession of living tradition and the right to be regarded as the centre of unity. No heresy pretended that the truth was vague and indefinite. The whole gist and meaning of a heresy was that it, the heresy, or he, the heresiarch, was prepared to make doctrine yet more sharp, and to assert his own definition.<br />
<br />
What you find in these foundational times is not the Catholic Church asserting and defining a thing and then, some time after, the heresiarch denying this definition; no heresy comes within a hundred miles of such a procedure. What happens in the early Church is that some doctrine not yet fully defined is laid down by such and such a man, that his final settlement clashes with the opinion of others, that after debate and counsel, and also authoritative statement on the part of the bishops, this man's solution is rejected and an orthodox solution is defined. From that moment the heresiarch, if he will not fall into line with defined opinion, ceases to be in communion; and his rejection, no less than his own original insistence upon his doctrine, are in themselves proofs that both he and his judges postulate unity and definition as the two necessary marks of Catholic truth.<br />
<br />
No early heretic or no early orthodox authority dreams of saying to his opponent: "You may be right! Let us agree to differ. Let us each form his part of 'Christian society' and look at things from his own point of view." The moment a question is raised it must of its nature, the early Church being what it was, be defined one way or the other.<br />
<br />
Well, then, what was this body of doctrine held by common tradition and present everywhere in the first years of the third century?<br />
<br />
Let me briefly set down what we know, as a matter of historical and documentary evidence, the Church of this period to have held. What we know is a very different matter from what we can guess. We may amplify it from our conceptions of the probable according to our knowledge of that society—as, for instance, when we say that there was probably a bishop at Marseilles before the middle of the second century. Or we may amplify it by guesswork, and suppose, in the absence of evidence, some just possible but exceedingly improbable thing: as, that an important canonical Gospel has been lost. There is an infinite range for guesswork, both orthodox and heretical. But the plain and known facts which repose upon historical and documentary evidence, and which have no corresponding documentary evidence against them, are both few and certain.<br />
<br />
Let us take such a writer as Tertullian and set down what was certainly true of his time.<br />
<br />
Tertullian was a man of about forty in the year 200. The Church then taught as an unbroken tradition that a Man who had been put to death about 170 years before in Palestine—only 130 years before Tertullian's birth—had risen again on the third day. This Man was a known and real person with whom numbers had conversed. In Tertullian's childhood men still lived who had met eye witnesses of the thing asserted.<br />
<br />
This Man (the Church said) was also the supreme Creator God. There you have an apparent contradiction in terms, at any rate a mystery, fruitful in opportunities for theory, and as a fact destined to lead to three centuries of more and more particular definition.<br />
<br />
This Man, Who also was God Himself, had, through chosen companions called Apostles, founded a strict and disciplined society called the Church. The doctrines the Church taught professed to be His doctrines. They included the immortality of the human soul, its redemption, its alternative of salvation and damnation.<br />
<br />
Initiation into the Church was by way of baptism with water in the name of The Trinity; Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Before His death this Man Who was also God had instituted a certain rite and Mystery called the Eucharist. He took bread and wine and changed them into His Body and Blood. He ordered this rite to be continued. The central act of worship of the Christian Church was therefore a consecration of bread and wine by priests in the presence of the initiated and baptized Christian body of the locality. The bread and wine so consecrated were certainly called (universally) the Body of the Lord.<br />
<br />
The faithful also certainly communicated, that is, eat the Bread and drank the Wine thus changed in the Mystery.<br />
<br />
It was the central rite of the Church thus to take the Body of the Lord.<br />
<br />
There was certainly at the head of each Christian community a bishop: regarded as directly the successor of the Apostles, the chief agent of the ritual and the guardian of doctrine.<br />
<br />
The whole increasing body of local communities kept in touch through their bishops, held one doctrine and practiced what was substantially one ritual.<br />
<br />
All that is plain history.<br />
<br />
The numerical proportion of the Church in the city of Carthage, where Tertullian wrote, was certainly large enough for its general suppression to be impossible. One might argue from one of his phrases that it was a tenth of the population. Equally certainly did the unity of the Christian Church and its bishops teach the institution of the Eucharist, the Resurrection, the authority of the Apostles, and their power of tradition through the bishops. A very large number of converts were to be noted and (to go back to Tertullian) the majority of his time, by his testimony, were recruited by conversion, and were not born Christians.<br />
<br />
Such is known to have been, in a very brief outline, the manner of the Catholic Church in these early years of the third century. Such was the undisputed manner of the Church, as a Christian or an inquiring pagan would have been acquainted with it in the years 160-200 and onwards.<br />
<br />
I have purposely chosen this moment, because it is the moment in which Christian evidence first emerges upon any considerable scale. Many of the points I have set down are, of course, demonstrably anterior to the third century. I mean by "demonstrably" anterior, proved in earlier documentary testimony. That ritual and doctrine firmly fixed are long anterior to the time in which you find them rooted is obvious to common sense. But there are documents as well.<br />
<br />
Thus, we have Justin Martyr. He was no less than sixty years older than Tertullian. He was as near to the Crucifixion as my generation is to the Reform Bill—and he gave us a full description of the Mass.<br />
We have the letters of St. Ignatius. He was a much older man than St. Justin—perhaps forty or fifty years older. He stood to the generations contemporary with Our Lord as I stand to the generation of Gladstone, Bismarck, and, early as he is, he testifies fully to the organization of the Church with its Bishops, the Eucharistic Doctrine, and the Primacy in it of the Roman See.<br />
<br />
The literature remaining to us from the early first century and a half after the Crucifixion is very scanty. The writings of what are called "Apostolic" times—that is, documents proceeding immediately from men who could remember the time of Our Lord, form not only in their quantity (and that is sufficiently remarkable), but in their quality, too, a far superior body of evidence to what we possess from the next generation. We have more in the New Testament than we have in the writings of these men who came just after the death of the Apostles. But what does remain is quite convincing. There arose from the date of Our Lord's Ascension into heaven, from, say, A. D. 30 or so, before the death of Tiberius and a long lifetime after the Roman organization of Gaul, a definite, strictly ruled and highly individual Society, with fixed doctrines, special mysteries, and a strong discipline of its own. With a most vivid and distinct personality, unmistakeable. And this Society was, and is, called "The Church."<br />
<br />
I would beg the reader to note with precision both the task upon which we are engaged and the exact dates with which we are dealing, for there is no matter in which history has been more grievously distorted by religious bias.<br />
<br />
The task upon which we are engaged is the judgment of a portion of history as it was. I am not writing here from a brief. I am concerned to set forth a fact. I am acting as a witness or a copier, not as an advocate or lawyer. And I say that the conclusion we can establish with regard to the Christian community on these main lines is the conclusion to which any man must come quite independently of his creed. He will deny these facts only if he has such bias against the Faith as interferes with his reason. A man's belief in the mission of the Catholic Church, his confidence in its divine origin, do not move him to these plain historical conclusions any more than they move him to his conclusions upon the real existence, doctrine and organization of contemporary Mormonism. Whether the Church told the truth is for philosophy to discuss: What the Church in fact was is plain history. The Church may have taught nonsense. Its organization may have been a clumsy human thing. That would not affect the historical facts.<br />
<br />
By the year 200 the Church was—everywhere, manifestly and in ample evidence throughout the Roman world—what I have described, and taught the doctrines I have just enumerated: but it stretches back one hundred and seventy years before that date and it has evidence to its title throughout that era of youth.<br />
<br />
To see that the state of affairs everywhere widely apparent in A.D. 200 was rooted in the very origins of the institution one hundred and seventy years before, to see that all this mass of ritual, doctrine and discipline starts with the first third of the first century, and the Church was from its birth the Church, the reader must consider the dates.<br />
<br />
We know that we have in the body of documents contained in the "canon" which the Church has authorized as the "New Testament," documents proceeding from men who were contemporaries with the origin of the Christian religion. Even modern scholarship with all its love of phantasy is now clear upon so obvious a point. The authors of the Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles, Clement also, and Ignatius also (who had conversed with the Apostles) may have been deceived, they may have been deceiving. I am not here concerned with that point. The discussion of it belongs to another province of argument altogether. But they were contemporaries of the things they said they were contemporaries of. In other words, their writings are what is called "authentic."<br />
<br />
If I read in the four Gospels (not only the first three) of such and such a miracle, I believe it or I disbelieve it. But I am reading the account of a man who lived at the time when the miracle is said to have happened. If you read (in Ignatius' seven certainly genuine letters) of Episcopacy and of the Eucharist, you may think him a wrong-headed enthusiast. But you know that you are reading the work of a man who personally witnessed the beginnings of the Church; you know that the customs, manners, doctrines and institutions he mentions or takes for granted, were certainly those of his time, that is, of the origin of Catholicism, though you may think the customs silly and the doctrines nonsense.<br />
<br />
St. Ignatius talking about the origin and present character of the Catholic Church is exactly in the position—in the matter of dates—of a man of our time talking about the rise and present character of the Socialists or of the rise and present character of Leopold's Kingdom of Belgium, of United Italy, the modern. He is talking of what is, virtually, his own time.<br />
<br />
Well, there comes after this considerable body of contemporary documentary evidence (evidence contemporary, that is, with the very spring and rising of the Church and proceeding from its first founders), a gap which is somewhat more than the long lifetime of a man.<br />
<br />
This gap is with difficulty bridged. The vast mass of its documentary evidence has, of course, perished, as has the vast mass of all ancient writing. The little preserved is mainly preserved in quotations and fragments. But after this gap, from somewhat before the year 200, we come to the beginning of a regular series, and a series increasing in volume, of documentary evidence. Not, I repeat, of evidence to the truth of supernatural doctrines, but of evidence to what these doctrines and their accompanying ritual and organization were: evidence to the way in which the Church was constituted, to the way in which she regarded her mission, to the things she thought important, to the practice of her rites.<br />
<br />
That is why I have taken the early third century as the moment in which we can first take a full historical view of the Catholic Church in being, and this picture is full of evidence to the state of the Church in its origins three generations before.<br />
<br />
I say, again, it is all-important for the reader who desires a true historical picture to seize the sequence of the dates with which we are dealing, their relation to the length of human life and therefore to the society to which they relate.<br />
<br />
It is all-important because the false history which has had its own way for so many years is based upon two false suggestions of the first magnitude. The first is the suggestion that the period between the Crucifixion and the full Church of the third century was one in which vast changes could proceed unobserved, and vast perversions of original ideas be rapidly developed; the second is that the space of time during which those changes are supposed to have taken place was sufficient to account for them.<br />
<br />
It is only because those days are remote from ours that such suggestions can be made. If we put ourselves by an effort of the imagination into the surroundings of that period, we can soon discover how false these suggestions are.<br />
<br />
The period was not one favorable to the interruption of record. It was one of a very high culture. The proportion of curious, intellectual, and skeptical men which that society contained was perhaps greater than in any other period with which we are acquainted. It was certainly greater than it is today. Those times were certainly less susceptible to mere novel assertion than are the crowds of our great cities under the influence of the modern press. It was a period astonishingly alive. Lethargy and decay had not yet touched the world of the Empire. It built, read, traveled, discussed, and, above all, criticized, with an enormous energy.<br />
<br />
In general, it was no period during which alien fashions could rise within such a community as the Church without their opponents being immediately able to combat them by an appeal to the evidence of the immediate past. The world in which the Church arose was one; and that world was intensely vivid. Anyone in that world who saw such an institution as Episcopacy (for instance) or such a doctrine as the Divinity of Christ to be a novel corruption of originals could have, and would have, protested at once. It was a world of ample record and continual communication.<br />
<br />
Granted such a world let us take the second point and see what was the distance in mere time between this early third century of which I speak and what is called the Apostolic period; that is, the generation which could still remember the origins of the Church in Jerusalem and the preaching of the Gospel in Grecian, Italian, and perhaps African cities. We are often told that changes "gradually crept in;" that "the imperceptible effect of time" did this or that. Let us see how these vague phrases stand the test of confrontation with actual dates.<br />
<br />
Let us stand in the years 200-210, consider a man then advanced in years, well read and traveled, and present in those first years of the third century at the celebration of the Eucharist. There were many such men who, if they had been able to do so, would have reproved novelties and denounced perverted tradition. That none did so is a sufficient proof that the main lines of Catholic government and practice had developed unbroken and unwarped from at least his own childhood. But an old man who so witnessed the constitution of the Church and its practices as I have described them in the year 200, would correspond to that generation of old people whom we have with us today; the old people who were born in the late twenties and thirties of the nineteenth century; the old people who can just remember the English Reform Bill, and who were almost grown up during the troubles of 1848 and the establishment of the second Empire in Paris: the old people in the United States who can remember as children the election of Van Buren to the office of President: the old people whose birth was not far removed from the death of Thomas Jefferson, and who were grown men and women when gold was first discovered in California.<br />
<br />
Well, pursuing that parallel, consider next the persecution under Nero. It was the great event to which the Christians would refer as a date in the early history of the Church. It took place in Apostolic times. It affected men who, though aged, could easily remember Judea in the years connected with Our Lord's mission and His Passion. St. Peter lived to witness, in that persecution, to the Faith. St. John survived it. It came not forty years later than the day of Pentecost. But the persecution under Nero was to an old man such as I have supposed assisting at the Eucharist in the early part of the third century, no further off than the Declaration of Independence is from the old people of our generation. An old man in the year 200 could certainly remember many who had themselves been witnesses of the Apostolic age, just as an old man today remembers well men who saw the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. The old people who had surrounded his childhood would be to St. Paul, St. Peter and St. John what the old people who survived, say, to 1845, would have been to Jefferson, to Lafayette, or to the younger Pitt. They could have seen and talked to that first generation of the Church as the corresponding people surviving in the early nineteenth century could have seen and talked with the founders of the United States.<br />
<br />
It is quite impossible to imagine that the Eucharistic Sacrifice, the Rite of Initiation (Baptism in the name of the Trinity), the establishment of an Episcopacy, the fierce defence of unity and orthodoxy, and all those main lines of Catholicism which we find to be the very essence of the Church in the early third century, could have risen without protest. They cannot have come from an innocent, natural, uncivilized perversion of an original so very recent and so open to every form of examination.<br />
<br />
That there should have been discussion as to the definition and meaning of undecided doctrines is natural, and fits in both with the dates and with the atmosphere of the period and with the character of the subject. But that a whole scheme of Christian government and doctrine should have developed in contradiction of Christian origins and yet without protest in a period so brilliantly living, full of such rapid intercommunication, and, above all, so brief, is quite impossible.<br />
<br />
That is what history has to say of the early Church in the Roman Empire. The Gospels, the Acts, the Canonical Epistles and those of Clement and Ignatius may tell a true or a false story; their authors may have written under an illusion or from a conscious self-deception; or they may have been supremely true and immutably sincere. But they are contemporary. A man may respect their divine origin or he may despise their claims to instruct the human race; but that the Christian body from its beginning was not "Christianity" but a Church and that that Church was identically one with what was already called long before the third century [Footnote: The Muratorian Fragment is older than the third century, and St. Ignatius, who also uses the word Catholic, was as near to the time of the Gospels as I am to the Crimean War.] the Catholic Church, is simply plain history, as plain and straightforward as the history, let us say, of municipal institutions in contemporary Gaul. It is history indefinitely better proved, and therefore indefinitely more certain than, let us say, modern guesswork on imaginary "Teutonic Institutions" before the eighth century or the still more imaginary "Aryan" origins of the European race, or any other of the pseudo-scientific hypotheses which still try to pass for historical truth.<br />
<br />
So much for the Catholic Church in the early third century when first we have a mass of evidence upon it. It is a highly disciplined, powerful growing body, intent on unity, ruled by bishops, having for its central doctrine the Incarnation of God in an historical Person, Jesus Christ, and for its central rite a Mystery, the transformation of Bread and Wine by priests into the Body and Blood which the faithful consume.<br />
<br />
This "State within the States" by the year 200 already had affected the Empire: in the next generation it permeated the Empire; it was already transforming European civilization. By the year 200 the thing was done. As the Empire declined the Catholic Church caught and preserved it.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Thus, Belloc. As ought to be readily apparent, the Church had executed the "Become Worthy" stage of Moldbug's procedure with (one might say) miraculous efficiency. Let's return to Warg Franklin's account:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Step Two, "Accept Power", is what happens when you are obviously 10x more competent than the current structure. You're not just a contingency plan anymore, but a recognizably better alternative right now, if only this rotten junk that is the current structure would get out of the way. And when that is clear, a number of options will present themselves. Members of the old structure will defect to yours, the important people will want you instead of them, social reality will shift, the old system will waver and fall while you pick up the pieces, etc. Completing the process will be a small matter of formalizing what everyone already knows in an atomic transfer of power. Atomic meaning that at time t, the old system is in charge, and at time t+1, the new system is in charge and running smoothly; ideally there is no costly period of collapse, confusion, and civil war. "Accept Power" is based on the ancient Chinese concept of the Mandate of Heaven, which states that power flows to the worthy; become actually worthy and you will receive the responsibility of power, as long as you accept it.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I can't pretend to know what Step Three, "Rule", entails; that is a job for the new structure built in step one. I would hope that it involves a general amnesty and policy of Retire All Government Employees rather than a bloody purge, and formalized ownership rather than nebulous concepts like "the people". But it's not up to me.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
So that's The Procedure. Note that at no point is it planned for there to be mass propaganda campaigns, civil or culture war, offensive actions against the system, a political party, or anything like that. That is, the whole procedure is "Passivist".</blockquote>
Indeed. The Church mounted no coup against Caesar's Curia. It simply became Worthy, and Waited. Then, it Accepted power. Belloc describes it:<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Europe and the Faith</i>, Chapter III:<br />
<br />
We are already familiar with the old popular and false explanation of the rise of the European nations. This explanation tells us that great numbers of vigorous barbarians entered the Roman Empire, conquered it, established themselves as masters, and parceled out its various provinces.<br />
<br />
We have seen that such a picture is fantastic and, when it is accepted, destroys a man's historic sense of Europe.<br />
<br />
We have seen that the barbarians who burst through the defence of civilization at various times (from before the beginnings of recorded history; through the pagan period prefacing Our Lord's birth; during the height of the Empire proper, in the third century; again in the fourth and the fifth) never had the power to affect that civilization seriously, and therefore were invariably conquered and easily absorbed. It was in the natural course of things this should be so.<br />
<br />
I say "in the natural course of things." Dreadful as the irruption of barbarians into civilized places must always be, even on a small scale, the conquest of civilization by barbarians is always and necessarily impossible. Barbarians may have the weight to destroy the civilization they enter, and in so doing to destroy themselves with it. But it is inconceivable that they should impose their view and manner upon civilized men. Now to impose one's view and manner, <i>dare leges</i> (to give laws), is to conquer.<br />
<br />
Moreover, save under the most exceptional conditions, a civilized army with its training, discipline and scientific traditions of war, can always ultimately have the better of a horde. In the case of the Roman Empire the armies of civilization did, as a fact, always have the better of the barbarian hordes. Marius had the better of the barbarians a hundred years before Our Lord was born, though their horde was not broken until it had suffered the loss of 200,000 dead. Five hundred years later the Roman armies had the better of another similar horde of barbarians, the host of Radagasius, in their rush upon Italy; and here again the vast multitude lost some 200,000 killed or sold into slavery. We have seen how the Roman generals, Alaric and the others, destroyed them.<br />
<br />
But we have also seen that within the Roman Army itself certain auxiliary troops (which may have preserved to some slight extent traces of their original tribal character, and probably preserved for a generation or so a mixture of Roman speech, camp slang, and the original barbaric tongues) assumed greater and greater importance in the Roman Army towards the end of the imperial period—that is, towards the end of the fourth, and in the beginning of the fifth, centuries (say, 350-450).<br />
<br />
We have seen why these auxiliary forces continued to increase in importance within the Roman Army, and we have seen how it was only as Roman soldiers, and as part of the regular forces of civilization, that they had that importance, or that their officers and generals, acting as Roman officers and generals, could play the part they did.<br />
<br />
The heads of these auxiliary forces were invariably men trained as Romans. They knew of no life save that civilized life which the Empire enjoyed. They regarded themselves as soldiers and politicians of the State in which—not against which—they warred. They acted wholly within the framework of Roman things. The auxiliaries had no memory or tradition of a barbaric life beyond the Empire, though their stock in some part sprang from it; they had no liking for barbarism, and no living communication with it. The auxiliary soldiers and their generals lived and thought entirely within those imperial boundaries which guarded paved roads, a regular and stately architecture, great and populous cities, the vine, the olive, the Roman law and the bishoprics of the Catholic Church. Outside was a wilderness with which they had nothing to do.<br />
<br />
Armed with this knowledge (which puts an end to any fantastic theory of barbarian "conquest"), let us set out to explain that state of affairs which a man born, say, a hundred years after the last of the mere raids into the Empire was destroyed under Radagasius, would have observed in middle age.<br />
<br />
Sidonius Apollinaris, the famous Bishop of Clermont-Ferrand, lived and wrote his classical work at such a date after Alaric's Roman adventure and Radagasius' defeat that the life of a man would span the distance between them; it was a matter of nearly seventy years between those events and his maturity. A grandson of his would correspond to such a spectator as we are imagining; a grandson of that generation might be born before the year 500. Such a man would have stood towards Radagasius' raid, the last futile irruption of the barbarian, much as men, old today, in England, stand to the Indian Mutiny and the Crimean War, to the second Napoleon in France, to the Civil War in the United States. Had a grandson of Sidonius traveled in Italy, Spain and Gaul in his later years, this is what he would have seen:<br />
<br />
In all the great towns Roman life was going on as it had always gone on, so far as externals were concerned. The same Latin speech, now somewhat degraded, the same dress, the same division into a minority of free men, a majority of slaves, and a few very rich masters round whom not only the slaves but the mass of the free men also were grouped as dependents.<br />
<br />
In every city, again, he would have found a Bishop of the Catholic Church, a member of that hierarchy which acknowledged its centre and headship to be at Rome. Everywhere religion, and especially the settlement of divisions and doubts in religion, would have been the main popular preoccupation. And everywhere save in Northern Gaul he would have perceived small groups of men, wealthy, connected with government, often bearing barbaric names, and sometimes (perhaps) still partly acquainted with barbaric tongues. Now these few men were as a rule of a special set in religion. They were called Arians; heretics who differed in religion from the mass of their fellow citizens very much as the minority of Protestants in an Irish county today differ from the great mass of their Catholic fellows; and that was a point of capital importance.<br />
<br />
The little provincial courts were headed by men who, though Christian (with the Mass, the Sacraments and all Christian things), were yet out of communion with the bulk of their officials, and all their taxpayers. They had inherited that odd position from an accident in the Imperial history. At the moment when their grandfathers had received Baptism the Imperial Court had supported this heresy. They had come, therefore, by family tradition, to regard their separate sect (with its attempt to rationalize the doctrine of the Incarnation) as a "swagger." They thought it an odd title to eminence. And this little vanity had two effects. It cut them off from the mass of their fellow citizens in the Empire. It made their tenure of power uncertain and destined to disappear very soon at the hands of men in sympathy with the great Catholic body—the troops led by the local governors of Northern France.<br />
<br />
We shall return to this matter of Arianism. But just let us follow the state of society as our grandson of Sidonius would have seen it at the beginning of the Dark Ages.<br />
<br />
The armed forces he might have met upon the roads as he traveled would have been rare; their accoutrements, their discipline, their words of command, were still, though in a degraded form, those of the old Roman Army. There had been no breach in the traditions of that Army or in its corporate life. Many of the bodies he met would still have borne the old imperial insignia.<br />
<br />
The money which he handled and with which he paid his bills at the inns, was stamped with the effigy of the reigning Emperor at Byzantium, or one of his predecessors, just as the traveler in a distant British colony today, though that province is virtually independent, will handle coins stamped with the effigies of English Kings. But though the coinage was entirely imperial, he would, upon a passport or a receipt for toll and many another official document he handled, often see side by side with and subordinate to the imperial name, the name of the chief of the local government.<br />
<br />
This phrase leads me to a feature in the surrounding society which we must not exaggerate, but which made it very different from that united and truly "Imperial" form of government which had covered all civilization two hundred to one hundred years before.<br />
<br />
The descendants of those officers who from two hundred to one hundred years before had only commanded regular or auxiliary forces in the Roman Army, were now seated as almost independent local administrators in the capitals of the Roman provinces.<br />
<br />
They still thought of themselves, in 550, say, as mere provincial powers within the one great Empire of Rome. But there was now no positive central power remaining in Rome to control them. The central power was far off in Constantinople. It was universally accepted, but it made no attempt to act.<br />
<br />
Let us suppose our traveler to be concerned in some commerce which brought him to the centres of local government throughout the Western Empire. Let him have to visit Paris, Toledo, Ravenna, Arles. He has, let us say, successfully negotiated some business in Spain, which has necessitated his obtaining official documents. He must, that is, come into touch with officials and with the actual Government in Spain. Two hundred years before he would have seen the officials of, and got his papers from, a government directly dependent upon Rome. The name of the Emperor alone would have appeared on all the papers and his effigy on the seals. Now, in the sixth century, the papers are made out in the old official way and (of course) in Latin, all the public forces are still Roman, all the civilization has still the same unaltered Roman character; has anything changed at all?<br />
<br />
Let us see.<br />
<br />
To get his papers in the Capital he will be directed to the "<i>Palatium</i>."<br />
<br />
This word does not mean "Palace." When we say "palace" today we mean the house in which lives the real or nominal ruler of a monarchical state. We talk of Buckingham Palace, St. James' Palace, the Palace in Madrid, and so on.<br />
<br />
But the original word Palatium had a very different meaning in late Roman society. It signified the official seat of Government, and in particular the centre from which the writs for Imperial taxation were issued, and to which the proceeds of that taxation were paid. The name was originally taken from the Palatine Hill in Rome, on which the Cæsars had their private house. As the mask of private citizenship was gradually thrown off by the Emperors, six hundred to five hundred years before, and as the commanders-in-chief of the Roman Army became more and more true and absolute sovereigns, their house became more and more the official centre of the Empire.<br />
<br />
The term "Palatium" thus became consecrated to a particular use. When the centre of Imperial power was transferred to Byzantium the word "Palatium" followed it; and at last it was applied to local centres as well as to the Imperial city. In the laws of the Empire then, in its dignities and honors, in the whole of its official life, the Palatium means the machine of government, local or imperial. Such a traveler as we have imagined in the middle of the sixth century comes, then, to that Spanish Palatium from which, throughout the five centuries of Imperial rule, the Spanish Peninsular had been locally governed. What would he find?<br />
<br />
He would find, to begin with, a great staff of clerks and officials, of exactly the same sort as had always inhabited the place, drawing up the same sort of documents as they had drawn up for generations, using certain fixed formulæ, and doing everything in the Latin tongue. No local dialect was yet of the least importance. But he would also find that the building was used for acts of authority, and that these acts were performed in the name of a certain person (who was no longer the old Roman Governor) and his Council. It was this local person's name, rather than the Emperor's, which usually—or at any rate more and more frequently—appeared on the documents.<br />
<br />
Let us look closely at this new person seated in authority over Spain, and at his Council: for from such men as he, and from the districts they ruled, the nations of our time and their royal families were to spring.<br />
<br />
The first thing that would be noticed on entering the presence of this person who governed Spain, would be that he still had all the insignia and manner of Roman Government.<br />
<br />
He sat upon a formal throne as the Emperor's delegate had sat: the provincial delegate of the Emperor. On official occasions he would wear the official Roman garments: the orb and the sceptre were already his symbols (we may presume) as they had been those of the Emperor and the Emperor's local subordinates before him. But in two points this central official differed from the old local Governor whom he exactly succeeded, and upon whose machinery of taxation he relief for power....<br />
<br />
[T]he Emperor in Byzantium, and before that in Rome or at Ravenna, worked, as even absolute power must work, through a multitude of men. He was surrounded by high dignitaries, and there devolved from him a whole hierarchy of officials, with the most important of whom he continually consulted. But the Emperor had not been officially and regularly bound in with such a Council. His formulæ of administration were personal formulæ. Now and then he mentioned his great officials, but he only mentioned them if he chose.<br />
<br />
This new local person, who had been very gradually and almost unconsciously substituted for the old Roman Governors, the <i>Rex</i>, was, on the contrary, a part of his own Council, and all his formulæ of administration mentioned the Council as his coadjutors and assessors in administration. This was necessary above all (a most important point) in anything that regarded the public funds....<br />
<br />
[T]he nature of authority very slowly changed, that the last links with the Roman Empire of the East—that is, with the supreme head at Constantinople—gradually dissolved in the West, and that the modern nation arose around these local governments of the Reges, is to be found in that novel feature, the standing Council of great men around the Rex, with whom everything is done.<br />
<br />
This standing Council expresses three forces, which between them, were transforming society. Those three forces were: first, certain vague underlying national feelings, older than the Empire, Gallic, Brittanic, Iberian; secondly, the economic force of the great Roman landowners, and, lastly, the living organization of the Catholic Church.<br />
<br />
On the economic, or material, side of society, the great landowners were the reality of that time.... This was the first element in that standing "Council of Great Men" which was the mark of the time in every locality and wore down the old official, imperial, absolute, local power.<br />
<br />
There was, however, as I have said, another and a much more important element in the Council of Great Men, besides the chief landowners; it consisted of the Hierarchy of the Catholic Church.<br />
<br />
Every Roman city of that time had a principal personage in it, who knew its life better than anybody else, who had, more than anyone else, power over its morals and ideas, and who in many cases actually administered its affairs. That person was the Bishop.<br />
<br />
Throughout Western Europe at that moment men's interest and preoccupation was not race nor even material prosperity, but religion. The great duel between Paganism and the Catholic Church was now decided, after two hard centuries of struggle, in favor of the latter. The Catholic Church, from a small but definite and very tenacious organization within the Empire, and on the whole antagonistic to it, had risen, first, to be the only group of men which knew its own mind (200 A.D.); next to be the official religion (300 A.D.); finally to be the cohesive political principle of the great majority of human beings (400 A.D.).<br />
<br />
The modern man can distinctly appreciate the phenomenon, if for "creed" he will read "capital," and for the "Faith," "industrial civilization." For just as today men principally care for great fortunes, and in pursuit of them go indifferently from country to country, and sink, as unimportant compared with such an object, the other businesses of our time, so the men of the fifth and sixth centuries were intent upon the unity and exactitude of religion. That the religion to which the Empire was now converted, the religion of the Catholic Church, should triumph, was their one preoccupation. For this they exiled themselves; for this they would and did run great risks; as minor to this they sank all other things.<br />
<br />
The Catholic hierarchy with its enormous power at that moment, civil and economic as well as religious, was not the creator of such a spirit, it was only its leader. And in connection with that intense preoccupation of men's minds, two factors already appear in the fourth century and are increasingly active through the fifth and sixth. The first is the desire that the living Church should be as free as possible; hence the Catholic Church and its ministers everywhere welcome the growth of local as against centralized power. They do so unconsciously but none the less strongly. The second factor is Arianism: to which I now return.<br />
<br />
Arianism, which both in its material success and in the length of its duration, as well as in its concept of religion, and the character of its demise, is singularly parallel to the Protestant movement of recent centuries, had sprung up as the official and fashionable Court heresy opposed to the orthodoxy of the Church.<br />
<br />
The Emperor's Court did indeed at last—after many variations—abandon it, but a tradition survived till long after (and in many places) that Arianism stood for the "wealthy" and "respectable" in life.<br />
<br />
Moreover, of those barbarians who had taken service as auxiliaries in the Roman armies, the greater part (the "Goths," for instance, as the generic term went, though that term had no longer any national meaning) had received their baptism into civilized Europe from Arian sources, and this in the old time of the fourth century when Arianism was "the thing." Just as we see in eighteenth century Ireland settlers and immigrants accepting Protestantism as "gentlemanly" or "progressive" (some there are so provincial as still to feel thus), so the Rex in Spain and the Rex in Italy had a family tradition; they, and the descendants of their original companions, were of what had been the "court" and "upper class" way of thinking. They were "Arians" and proud of it. The number of these powerful heretics in the little local courts was small, but their irritant effect was great.<br />
<br />
It was the one great quarrel and problem of the time.<br />
<br />
No one troubled about race, but everybody was at white heat upon the final form of the Church.<br />
<br />
The populace felt it in their bones that if Arianism conquered, Europe was lost: for Arianism lacked vision. It was essentially a hesitation to accept the Incarnation and therefore it would have bred sooner or later a denial of the Sacrament, and at length it would have relapsed, as Protestantism has, into nothingness. Such a decline of imagination and of will would have been fatal to a society materially decadent. Had Arianism triumphed, the aged Society of Europe would have perished.<br />
<br />
Now it so happened that of these local administrators or governors who were rapidly becoming independent, and who were surrounded by a powerful court, one only was not Arian.<br />
<br />
That one was the <i>Rex Francorum</i> or chieftain of the little barbaric auxiliary force of "Franks" which had been drawn into the Roman system from Belgium and the banks of the lower Rhine. This body at the time when the transformation took place between the old Imperial system and the beginnings of the nations, had its headquarters in the Roman town of Tournai.<br />
<br />
A lad whose Roman name was Clodovicus, and whom his parents probably called by some such sound as Clodovig (they had no written language), succeeded his father, a Roman officer, [Footnote: He was presumably head of auxiliaries. His tomb has been found. It is wholly Roman.] in the generalship of this small body of troops at the end of the fifth century. Unlike the other auxiliary generals he was pagan. When with other forces of the Roman Army, he had repelled one of the last of the barbaric invaders close to the frontier at the Roman town of Tolbiacum, and succeeded to the power of local administration in Northern Gaul, he could not but assimilate himself with the civilization wherein he was mixed, and he and most of his small command were baptized. He had already married a Christian wife, the daughter of the Burgundian Rex; but in any case such a conclusion was inevitable.<br />
<br />
The important historical point is not that he was baptized; for an auxiliary general to be baptized was, by the end of the fifth century, as much a matter of course as for an Oriental trader from Bombay, who has become an English Lord or Baronet in London in our time, to wear trousers and a coat. The important thing is that he was received and baptized by Catholics and not by Arians—in the midst of that enormous struggle.<br />
<br />
Clodovicus—known in history as Clovis—came from a remote corner of civilization. His men were untouched by the worldly attraction of Arianism; they had no tradition that it was "the thing" or "smart" to adopt the old court heresy which was offensive to the poorer mass of Europeans. When, therefore, this Rex Francorum was settled in Paris—about the year 500—and was beginning to administer local government in Northern Gaul, the weight of his influence was thrown with the popular feeling and against the Arian Reges in Italy and Spain.<br />
<br />
The new armed forces of the Rex Francorum, a general levy continuing the old Roman tradition, settling things once and for all by battle carried orthodox Catholic administration all over Gaul. They turned the Arian Rex out of Toulouse, they occupied the valley of the Rhone. For a moment it seemed as though they would support the Catholic populace against the Arian officials in Italy itself.<br />
<br />
At any rate, their championship of popular and general religion against the irritant, small, administrative Arian bodies in the Palatium of this region and of that, was a very strong lever which the people and the Bishops at their head could not but use in favor of the Rex Francorum's independent power. It was, therefore, indirectly, a very strong lever for breaking up the now (500-600) decayed and almost forgotten administrative unity of the Roman world.<br />
<br />
Under such forces—the power of the Bishop in each town and district, the growing independence of the few and immensely rich great landowners, the occupation of the Palatium and its official machinery by the chieftains of the old auxiliary forces—Western Europe, slowly, very slowly, shifted its political base.<br />
<br />
For three generations the mints continued to strike money under the effigy of the Emperor. The new local rulers never took, or dreamed of taking, the Imperial title; the roads were still kept up, the Roman tradition in the arts of life, though coarsened, was never lost. In cooking, dress, architecture, law, and the rest, all the world was Roman. But the visible unity of the Western or Latin Empire not only lacked a civilian and military centre, but gradually lost all need for such a centre.<br />
<br />
Towards the year 600, though our civilization was still one, as it had always been, from the British Channel to the Desert of Sahara, and even (through missionaries) extended its effect a few miles eastward of the old Roman frontier beyond the Rhine, men no longer thought of that civilization as a highly defined area within which they could always find the civilian authority of one organ. Men no longer spoke of our Europe as the Respublica or "common weal." It was already beginning to become a mass of small and often overlapping divisions. The things that are older than, and lie beneath, all exact political institutions, the popular legends, the popular feelings for locality and countrysides, were rising everywhere; the great landowners were appearing as semi-independent rulers, each on his own estates (though the many estates of one man were often widely separated).<br />
<br />
The daily speech of men was already becoming divided into an infinity of jargons.<br />
<br />
Some of these dialects were of Latin origin, some as in the Germanies and Scandinavia, mixed original Teutonic and Latin; some, as in Brittany, were Celtic; some, as in the eastern Pyrenees, Basque; in North Africa, we may presume, the indigenous tongue of the Berbers resumed its sway; Punic also may have survived in certain towns and villages there. [Footnote: We have evidence that it survived in the fifth century.] But men paid no attention to the origin of such diversities. The common unity that survived was expressed in the fixed Latin tongue, the tongue of the Church; and the Church, now everywhere supreme in the decay of Arianism and of paganism alike, was the principle of life throughout all this great area of the West.<br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
And thus, the Church "accepted" power. After the Empire had declined into its long senility, only the Church had enough organization, enough discipline, enough Spirit, to "rule."<br />
<br />
Warg Franklin's account of Moldbug's procedure continues to the third and final step:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I can't pretend to know what Step Three, "Rule", entails; that is a job for the new structure built in step one.</blockquote>
Fair enough. When the Church came to rule in Western Europe, it forged Latin Christendom. What the fate of the Church and the world will be centuries from now, is no more for me to know than for Mr. Franklin.<br />
<br />
But in the meantime, there is this matter of Step One: "become worthy." Back to Warg:<br />
<br />
<blockquote>
Passivism is the political methodology that is behind the Procedure. It is almost exactly the opposite of activism. The activist looks at the world and sees problems in the system about which something must be done. He leverages his political rights to convince and agitate the public, affect change through various mechanisms, and get society to fix the problem. The passivist, on the other hand, has no political rights, and he does not try to shift public opinion or influence the system in any way. The steel rule of Passivism is absolute renunciation of official power....</blockquote>
<blockquote>
The passivist is a subject, not a citizen; he is absolutely at the mercy of the system, whatever it is and whatever it decides to do. If the system orders him to jump, he jumps, but otherwise he goes about his private business. The passivist serenely refrains from having outraged and partisan opinions on the latest "social issues". His solemn duty is to submit to and obey the system.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
That's liberating, in a way, but our activism-tainted minds are quick to reject it. We wonder exactly how we are supposed to take power and fix anything with this doctrine of political harmlessness. It's a bit too Zen for us neophytes; "to take power," says the master, "you must first renounce power".</blockquote>
<blockquote>
When I first heard this, it seemed stupid. But having thought it over and having decided to approach these things seriously and strategically, Passivism now seems obviously correct. Passivism is harmless, yes, but it is also deadly. As for how to take power, well, the passivist does not take power, he accepts it. And to accept power, he must first become worthy of power. And the way to become worthy is not at all mysterious:<br />
Persuade a small group of high-quality people to come to your way of thinking, build institutions that humbly solve problems, and eventually build a larger network of institutions that could actually step in and do a better job than the current system.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
This we have heard before; The Procedure is just Passivism applied to the problem of government.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Why?</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Passivism and thus The Procedure is the principled ideal. Step 1 in practice may fail to be perfectly passivist. Step 2 may fail to be perfectly bloodless or atomic. But it's always worth it to plan up front to do it the most principled and ideal way it could possibly be done, and back down from that idealism only when it is shown to be impossible, so that we spend the time and effort to do things the right way instead of accepting half-assed solutions. In my experience as an engineer, this stubborn principle of striving for the ideal has consistently led to superior work that I didn't always know I could do. This is the idealism of high standards, not to be confused with the idealism of willful blindness to the rough edges of the world. The right kind of idealism is deeply principled and pragmatically tactical at the same time. We will expand on the reasoning later, but briefly:<br />
<ul>
<li>Passivism is simply and obviously moral. Everyone is a Passivist in a state of rectified politics, and we can't ask other people to accept something we wouldn't accept ourselves.</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>Passivism is stealth and armour. The system knows how to defend against, subvert, and destroy activist challenges. Passivism flies below their radar, and when they do notice you, they have no legal or moral pretext to shut you down.</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>Passivism degrades gracefully to a healthy and normal human life. If we fail to take over the world or whatever, we still build useful institutions, and don't blow anything up or waste the public's resources and attention.</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>Passivism does not feed the hysteria of the system, which thrives on the spectre of radical right-wing activism and imagined Vast Right Wing Conspiracies. We accept that their rule is what it is and don't resist; we are just planning and building for contingency. What is there to get worked up about?</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>Passivism enforces strategic thinking and low time preference. Raised on a diet of action movies and mythologized political history, it is every modern person's reflex to want political problems to be solved by magicking up an army and doing something with fire, but this isn't realistic or helpful. Passivism excludes people who can't think beyond this, and reinforces the conviction of those who can.</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>Passivism avoids the corrupting pressures of seeking popularity, i.e. Hitler. Seeking power through popularity with a mass of people always involves dumbing things down to be more viral, more populist, more feel-good. This is rarely aligned with what is good and strategic. The methodology that avoids the pressures of popularity is able to avoid their ugly failure modes.</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>Passivism and disengagement from culture war allows us to take defectors from all sides. Since we're not marching, we don't have to wave anyone's flag or pattern match to anyone's sworn culture enemies.</li>
</ul>
Passivism is the official political methodology of this blog. It's why we try to avoid current events, don't talk about what the government should do, and constrain our prescriptions to just what we can do for ourselves and our immediate communities. The details and practice of Passivism go very deep, but a surface-level understanding as presented in this article is a necessary starting point.</blockquote>
<br />
Thus, Warg Franklin. Now, I'm enough of a sentimental patriot that I'm no Passivist. But there's far, far more wisdom here than in the usual obsession with politics--which is ephemeral, and over which we have practically no power in any case. If the Christian is to err, better nowadays to err on the side of the Passivism just described, than to fall into our age's obsession with partisan political trivialities.<br />
<br />
Let's hear a bit more from old Moldy himself about this Steel Rule of Passivism.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.ca/2009/09/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html" style="font-style: italic;">A gentle introduction to Unqualified Reservations (part 9a)</a>:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The Procedure comes in Three Steps:<br />
I. Become worthy.<br />
II. Accept power.<br />
III. Rule....</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
You think I'm kidding. But I'm not. Let's go straight to the -</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
First Step.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"Become worthy." What could this possibly mean? Is it Zen? It sure sounds like Zen.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It is Zen to the bone.... The First Step is the most difficult of the Three Steps. To be frank, it's quite possible that your Reaction will never make it past this step. It's more than possible. It's almost certain. But waste your time on the First Step - and what have you wasted?</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Confucius said: to set the world in order, first set yourself in order....</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Another fact: if you show up for your first fencing class, they don't just hand you a bardiche. The Procedure too is dangerous. It too has its prerequisites, although it only has one.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Before you begin any positive work on the First Step, you must master the daunting spiritual discipline of passivism. This exercise itself may consume a lifetime. But with UR's simple and down-to-earth instructions, it will go much more quickly. You may even find that you have already completed it.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The steel rule of passivism is absolute renunciation of official power. We note instantly that any form of resistance to sovereignty, so long as it succeeds, is a share in power itself. Thus, absolute renunciation of power over USG [the U.S. Government] implies absolute submission to the Structure.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The logic of the steel rule is simple. As a reactionary, you don't believe that political power is a human right. You will never convince anyone to adopt the same attitude, without first adopting it yourself. Since you believe others should be willing to accept the rule of the New Structure, over which they wield no power, you must be the first to make the great refusal. They must submit to the New; you must submit to the Old.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The reactionary's opinion of USG is that it is what it is. It is run by the people who run it. And at present, the present management may well be the best people in the world to run USG, and even if they're not he can't imagine what might be done about it - short of replacing the whole thing. This simple and final judgment, like the death penalty, admits no possible compromise.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In particular, passivism is to Gandhi as Gandhi is to Hitler. Hitler, before 1933, was a violent democratic activist; Gandhi was a nonviolent democratic activist. Passivism is not any sort of activism. Passivism is passivism. In plain English, you may not even begin to consider the rest of the Procedure until you have freed yourself entirely from the desire, built-in burden though it be of the two-legged ape, for power. Break the steel rule, change your name to "Darth," don't expect to keep your internship at the Jedi Council.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As a matter of both principle and tactics, the passivist rejects any involvement with any activity whose goal is to influence, coerce, or resist the government, either directly or indirectly. He is revolted by the thought of setting public policy. He would rather drink his own piss, than shift public opinion. He finds elections - national, state or local - grimly hilarious. And if he needs to get from Richmond to Baltimore, he drives through West Virginia.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The passivist has a term for democratic activism directed by the right against the left. That term is counter-activism. Passivism does not dispute the fact that counter-activism sometimes works. For instance, it worked for Hitler. (We'll say more about Hitler.) However, it only works in very unusual circumstances (such as those of Hitler), and is extremely dangerous when it does work (eg, the result may be Hitler).</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In case this isn't crystal-clear, the steel rule precludes, in no particular order: demonstrations, press releases, suicide bombs, lawsuits, dirty bombs, Facebook campaigns, clean bombs, mimeographed leaflets, robbing banks, interning at nonprofits, assassination, "tea parties," journalism, bribery, grantwriting, graffiti, crypto-anarchism, balaclavas, lynching, campaign contributions, revolutionary cells, new political parties, old political parties, flash mobs, botnets, sit-ins, direct mail, monkeywrenching, and any other activist technique, violent or harmless, legal or illegal, fashionable or despicable.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As a broad analogy, the passivist's relationship to USG is much like the relationship of an American expatriate in Costa Rica, to the government of Costa Rica. He has no illusions about it. He submits to its authority in every detail. He is happy when it succeeds, and sad when it screws up. And he's about as likely to try to horn in on its decision structure as he is to move to Iran and run for Grand Ayatollah.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
One excellent way to make this relationship concrete in your mind is to use the word "subject," rather than "citizen." If by some unfortunate coincidence you remain a resident of the British Isles, you are already taught to say "subject." So you'll have to shift to something even more demeaning, like "peasant." This may still overstate your political impact.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The steel rule has one exception that demonstrates the rule. As a passivist, you can still address direct, individual petitions to the sovereign - eg, calling your Congressman. Individual petition does not violate the steel rule because any petition from subject to sovereign is already a confession of abject submission. Only the powerless beg. The rite, of course, is ancient.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Voting is a borderline case for the passivist. Is it an aggressive act of defiance to refrain from voting - or does electoral participation constitute impermissible political intervention? Either way, you might be breaching the steel rule. Perhaps the most careful policy is to always vote for the candidate or measure that the newspapers expect to win, abstaining only in close contests.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But obviously, the impact of all votes of all passivists put together will be trivial. Or if it isn't, someone has been evading the steel rule, and the name no longer means itself. As a passivist, your vote is an irrelevant detail of personal conscience. It's improper to even mention it....</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
And that's the steel rule. I don't think it gets much clearer. But, um - why?</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Why, exactly, are you a passivist? You thought you were trying to seize power. But here you are, renouncing it irrevocably! What's up with that?</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Ah. But there is no contradiction at all.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Passivism is Zen. It is non-Zen. It is counterintuitive and romantic. It is trivial and cold-blooded. It is deeply principled and tactically deadly. Passivism is only the first step of the First Step - but its spirit informs the entire Reaction. Let's take a quick peek ahead, and see why.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[Let's] look at the four major tactical benefits of passivism....</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
First tactical benefit: the passivist immediately drops off the Structure's defensive radar screen. While it must at all times be kept in mind that the Structure is not a conspiracy and has no star topology, it can be described as the organization of all those corrupted by power. If there is one thing these people understand, it is activism - the art of controlling USG from outside its formal boundaries. It is their art. And they sure don't like it when it's turned against them.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If there is one thing progressives are good at, it is identifying and targeting a competing activist who is attempting, futilely as we have seen above, to out-mafia the mafia. Right-wing activism acts as a sort of adjuvant to the Structure's immune system. It activates every possible defense mechanism. Some of which are really quite nasty.....</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
What does the difference between activism and passivism look like in practice? Let's take blogging. Obviously, in a democracy or anything like it, a blog is a political weapon. But the correct tactics for activist and passivist blogs differ.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The activist blog, which seeks power through democratic means, must seek to build an intellectual clientela of the largest possible size. Unique reader count is the best possible metric for the success of an activist blog. Naturally, anyone who reads blog X has that much less time to read blog Y, so X and Y, activist blogs, must be competitive. And obviously, anyone who seeks power must seek to take it away from someone else - activism is inherently aggressive.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The passivist blog does not seek power by any means at all. Its activities are neither aggressive nor destructive, but constructive (ideally leading into a reaction center, as we'll see later). Therefore, it is concerned not with the number of people who read it, but with the quality of people who read it. If it takes the next step and becomes a reaction center, its construction workers must be found among this motley crew.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Result: a counter-activist blog, if it achieves any success, will automatically (a) be identified by the T-cells as a dangerous, quasi-fascist Internet cult, and (b) attract a clientela who live up to exactly this dossier. Either way, any further effectiveness is precluded.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Whereas the passivist blog will appear, at worst, harmless and extremely strange....<br />
Second tactical benefit: the problem isn't just that stimulating the left's immune system is harmful to the right. If it was harmful to the left as well, that might be tactically acceptable.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
But since leftism is a decentralized movement, not a centralized conspiracy, stimulating the left's immune system just means stimulating the left.... In the <i>tu-quoque</i> mindset, any form of resistance to progressive government is defined as naked, illegitimate aggression. It naturally produces a counterreaction which is just as aggressive, often more unprincipled, and always much stronger....</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Moreover, if counter-activism somehow actually does work, we arrive at the converse of our third benefit. That is, of course: Hitler. While successful counter-activism might not always produce Hitler, we cannot avoid the fact that it did produce Hitler. Thus...<br />
Third tactical benefit: Hitler prevention. To an orthodox reactionary, Hitler is basically the poster child for what happens if you break the steel rule....</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Since most people are neither historians nor philosophers, the fact that Hitler was on the extreme Right, and this Reaction is also on the extreme Right, raises some natural concerns. Again: the only way to face these concerns is to (a) provide a complete engineering explanation of Hitler, and (b) include an effective anti-Hitler device in our design....</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In practice, an activist policy attracts supporters because humans (of all races, alas) are apes, and apes are attracted to power. Typically the activist's superego explains this in terms of the noble goals which he will achieve with said power. (These noble goals are generally found to include making other apes dependent on him.) His good old ape ego, however, is attracted to the work - the feeling of collectively struggling for power.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This is where passivism, by abjuring democracy, vaccinates itself against Hitler. True: at a higher level, the reactionary seeks to cause a transition in power, and thus in a sense seeks power itself. But he is not an activist, because he is not working for power. His actions do not excite the human political instinct, the love for forming coalitions and tearing hell out of the apes across the river. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For one thing, said actions bear no resemblance to normal politics. For another, they cannot bring any actual power to the actors, even if they succeed. Which, however likely, must remain intuitively implausible - if not laughable. And thus the project of reaction does not attract those with a real taste for power, which if nothing else is very un-Nazi-like....</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Fourth tactical benefit: passivism allows the Reaction to recruit both progressives and conservatives - so long as they abandon their activist programs.....</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Traditionalist religious conservatives, in particular, should consider this: what traditionalist sects in America have been most successful in preserving their values and society? Answer: probably a tie, between the Pennsylvania Dutch and the Brooklyn Chasidim. What do both these communities have in common? In a word: passivism. To survive, submit and adapt. To be destroyed, try to fight back.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Thus we see the tactical power of the steel rule.... If the moral principle doesn't convince you, the tactics should.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
We will now assume that the steel rule is indelibly engraved in your soul. [Now] we can talk about what to do.</blockquote>
<br />
***<br />
<br />
Thus, Moldbug.<br />
<br />
For all my many differences with the NRx DE folks, there is good advice here. Opt out of politics. BenOpt instead. I defer to the Council Fathers of Vatican II who teach that the laity ought to take responsibility for the civic good. So I cannot endorse this Passivist ideal any more than I can endorse the rest of the NRx project. But there's good Egyptian gold here.<br />
<br />
We contemporary Christians are unworthy to be heard readily by our culture, or to have a culture shaped by our churches shape politics in its turn. We need to begin at the beginning:<br />
<br />
<i><b>Confucius said: to set the world in order, first set yourself in order....</b></i>Irenisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16870614125489778250noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-74136635702610904942015-12-05T13:30:00.001-06:002015-12-07T07:40:00.768-06:00Newman OptionsOne of the reasons Rod Dreher often cites for the necessity of a <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/benedict-option-faq/">Benedict Option</a> is the way that secular universities have become in some ways actively anti-Christian. And, indeed, there's much to be said for encouraging one's Catholic children to attend the sort of supportive, faith-nurturing universities highlighted in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Newman">Cardinal Newman</a> Society's <a href="http://www.cardinalnewmansociety.org/TheNewmanGuide/RecommendedColleges.aspx">recommended colleges</a>. But not all the college-bound will attend rigorously orthodox, welcoming and warm Catholic colleges. Many will--and should, for whatever reason--attend secular universities, whether public or private.<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In contexts like that the campus Catholic chapel, often called a Newman Center, can be an oasis. Indeed, the <a href="http://www.newmanumass.org/">Newman Center at UMass Amherst</a> (where I was then taking posbacs for my erstwhile career as a math teacher) played an irreplaceable role in my own journey home to Rome. So I was delighted to read that some Newman Centers are taking things to a whole new level, essentially creating a BenOp not of separate colleges, but of Christ-saturated life within secular universities, through the creation of "Newman Halls," that is, Catholic-focused dorms centered on Newman Center chapels.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
This is a very, very promising development. I learned of it through <a href="http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/students-keep-the-faith-on-secular-campuses-thanks-to-newman-dorms/#ixzz3rhFcce1L">a great story in the National Catholic Register</a>, and I hope you'll take the time to <i>tolle, lege</i>, especially if you're an academic in a position to help build something like this at your own school. </div>
Irenisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16870614125489778250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-59955184012611288512015-12-05T13:15:00.002-06:002015-12-05T13:15:47.379-06:00Murphys' LawAn early form of Niebuhr's <i>Serenity Prayer</i> runs:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
O God, give us the serenity to accept what cannot be changed,<br />The courage to change what can be changed,<br />and the wisdom to know the one from the other.</blockquote>
We cannot, in the present political moment, pass gun sensible control legislation in this country. However advisable it would (indeed) be, it cannot, in any case, presently be done.<br />
<br />
However, Rep. Tim Murphy (R-Penn.) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D.-Conn.) are attempting to move mental health legislation through the Congress that looks like it might do a great deal of good, and, what's more, looks like it might actually have a chance of passing. The Murphys' law not only contains much that would help the mentally ill in a variety of contexts, but also contains much that could help prevent the mentally unbalanced from being untreated and likely to engage in a mass shooting. This is not, sadly, sensible gun control. But it's still a really big deal in its own right.<br />
<br />
I enjoy my potshots at <i>Vox</i>, but Michelle Hackman of <i>Vox </i>has a very fine rundown of this very worthwhile American initiative: <a href="http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/12/4/9845434/tim-murphy-mental-health-bill-mass-shootings">take it up, and read</a>.<br />
<br />
<br />Irenisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16870614125489778250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-64195047879445789452015-12-05T12:57:00.002-06:002015-12-05T13:03:03.378-06:00Abortion is (not first degree) murderIn the same <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/pro-choice-taunter-deadly-logic-planned-parenthood/">post</a> at Rod Dreher's about abortion rhetoric, I attempted to explain to a friendly pro-choice interlocutor why our intuitions differ about the rhetorical propriety of the phrase “abortion is murder.” A lightly edited version of my comment follows below the fold:<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><div style="text-align: center;">
I.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
As a legal matter, murder is <i>inter alia </i>specifically killing that is illegal. Thus, simply by definition, abortion cannot be murder under a regime that considers abortion lawful.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
As a further legal matter, there are myriad categories of homicide. We begin with the old Common Law distinctions between murder, manslaughter, and justifiable homicides like self-defense or those otherwise legitimately incident to say, police work or military service. Then, of course, the old Common Law terms are supplemented by the vaguely Continental criminal codes that have replaced (or more often, honestly, just rephrased) the old Anglo-American Common Law notions in federal and almost all state law. So we then get all sorts of codified gradations of “homicide” of various kinds, degrees, etc.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Now, in both the old Common Law and the present penal codes, it certainly does make sense to distinguish the illegal homicide that occurred due to unforeseeable accident, negligence, or duress (e.g., the killing of a wife-beater by his wife) from the “premeditated first degree murder” sort of homicide.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
And I think that it’s this set of intuitions and discursive habits that pro-choicers are understandably bringing to discussions both here and in the wider public square.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
II.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Pro-lifers are usually no less conversant with the legal norms I’ve just discussed. But many of us also spend a great deal of time on the Talmudic parsing of Scriptural legal codes and on philosophical argumentation in the Greco-Roman natural law tradition.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In both of these contexts, one very prominent distinction that one encounters ubiquitously is that between “killing” and “murder.” It is a commonplace of discussions of the Decalogue or the Dominical sayings that one ought not interpret this or that Hebrew or Greek word for “murder” as though it meant “kill.” For instance, if you google “murder vs. killing” you’ll find that most of the first-page results will be about the commandment that “thou shalt not kill”—either the Fifth or the Fourth, depending upon one’s denomination.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In particular, just about everyone who has spent any nontrivial time at all reading debates between pacifists and just war theorists and other advocates for a (limited!) place for violence within Christian life in this fallen world will carry around in his or her head as a stock bit of mental furniture a basic familiarity with arguments about how “Thou shalt not kill” forbids murder in particular, and not all killing.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Thus, for the Biblically focused mind, it is both natural and contextually <i>entirely legitimate</i> to think of “murder” as being a broad term for all the various sorts of unjustified, wrongful killing (whether legal under man’s law in a given jurisdiction or not).</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
So while in the positivistic sense, it was not murder—because not illegal—under Third Reich law* to gas Jews, in the Biblical exegete’s sense, it was murder. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
*(Nuremberg, of course, later decreed by an admittedly incomparably noble lie [but still a lie] that it had already been illegal under international law. That is beside the present paragraph’s point, which is merely to elucidate the illegal/wrongful distinction.)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Not only does this murder / killing dichotomy fulfill a real need in theological discourse, but it also reflects the spirit of traditional English speech and writing. It is certainly true that “murder” quite early in its development took on all sorts of specifically juridical associations. But the term itself is as solidly Anglo-Saxon as “killing,” and isn’t one of the always already merely legal terms that came into Middle English with the Law French of the Anglo-Normans.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
To be sure, long before William conquered, the Saxon kings had law courts that distinguished murder from killing. Nevertheless, this ancient Saxon doublet fossilizes for us not merely the Thrasymachan conventionalist’s distinction between legal / illegal, but the pre-legal, logically and culturally prior moralist’s distinction between manslaying that is <i>rightful </i>and manslaying that is <i>wrong</i>.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In short, while the pro-choicer’s murder/homicide/killing gradations belong to Creon (and are appropriate enough in his sphere of positive manmade law), the Biblical exegete’s distinction belongs to Antigone (and to her wider sphere of the claims of natural and Divine law upon man’s laws.)</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
III.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Thus, as is so often the case, the progressive is speaking for and from the assumptions of the City of Man, while the trad is critiquing them from a stance within and on prophetic behalf of the City of God.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
When we say that abortion is murder, you hear us saying that it is first-degree intentional homicide and should be punished to the full extent of positive law. What we are <i>actually </i>saying is that, in contrast to self-defense, killing by abortion is morally wrong.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
To ask us to abandon our millennia of tradition of discussing killing vs. murder in the way we do in order to conform to some Rawlsian canon of secular public reason in the naked public square is ultimately to insist upon making elite progressive discourse hegemonic over against subaltern voices like those of the Appalachian welfare recipient striving to read his Bible aright, or the blue collar retiree praying her rosary outside an abortion clinic. It is to say that the bureaucratic discourse of the Anglo-Norman attorney or the <i>Vox </i>infographic-composing glib Harvard grad must always condition and stand in judgment over the Saxon peasants jawboning by the town well or the black Pentecostals chatting in the barbershop, who know in their bones that some things are just <i>wrong</i>.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
If you want to discuss whether the murder that is abortion is of the duressed sort that, like the murder of a wife-beater in his sleep, ought to carry a very light sentence indeed, then fine. That’s an important discussion to have, with nuances that are admittedly of grave import and need to be teased out.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But we pro-lifers are going to insist upon having that discussion in terms of <i>kinds of murder</i>, not in terms of “degrees of homicide.” That’s not incitement. It’s a subaltern dialect of English that contains all sorts of moral wisdom from regular folks that progressive elites ought to dignify as discursive peers, instead of dismissing them as hate-spewing trailer trash.</div>
Irenisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16870614125489778250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-85400001485746430312015-12-05T12:40:00.002-06:002015-12-05T12:42:54.422-06:00Jesus loves Mengele<span style="font-family: inherit;">Rod Dreher had a <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/pro-choice-taunter-deadly-logic-planned-parenthood/">post</a> up recently about the rhetoric in America's interminable abortion debates. I had been commenting to defend the typical pro-life statement that "abortion is murder" (which it is), and the propriety of comparing abortionists to Nazi medical experimenter Josef Mengele (since both, despite many admittedly salient differences, are examples of vivisectionists). Meanwhile, a fellow Christian pro-lifer intervened with what I took to be a distressing callousness regarding the deaths during the recent Planned Parenthood clinic shooting in Colorado Springs. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">I humbly propose that what follows is worth reading not only as an intervention in the abortion discussion, but more so as a reflection on how we ought to think about the infinite compassion of Our Incarnate Lord.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;">What follows below the fold is a lightly edited transcript of my comments in response to this fellow Christian, beginning with a </span>quotation from his remarks:<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I will not have sympathy for those who have intentionally seared their conscious to the point that they are no longer humans but ogres, demons who eat the flesh of man. They themselves who have cast their humanity away.</blockquote>
This is, literally, dehumanizing, demonizing rhetoric. This is rhetoric that leads to Hell. As a brother in Christ, I must rebuke you. You need to root this apathy and scorn out of yourself while you are still alive to do it. You cannot loathe your fellow men like this and attain <i>theosis</i>. You simply cannot. It is not possible.<br />
<br />
Judas and Pilate were not demons, but men. Hitler and Stalin were not ogres, but men. Christ died on the Cross for all four of them. Really, He did. (Whether they chose to accept the grace He won for them on the Cross is another matter. But He died for them as much as for you or me.) Christ cried out from the Cross, “Forgive them Father.” Christ had so much sympathy for His own murderers that even as He writhed in agony, He found time to pray for them.<br />
<br />
In a very real cultural and political sense, the abortionist is indeed our enemy. But we are under Christ’s orders to love our enemies. Love.<br />
<br />
I am not being sentimental or mawkish. I am deadly serious and I am speaking to you as one combatant to another about a very real problem on the battlefield: You and I and every other Christian are engaged in a daily fight for our souls with Satan. That is the war in which we fight. Your words here indicate that you are presently losing your war. We’re like two junior officers standing on a hill, and from here I can see that your troops are heading into an ambush: you need to go save them right now.<br />
<br />
In an entirely non-metaphorical way, you risk spending all eternity seared endlessly by dark flame, devoured by the worm that does not die. I could not possibly be more serious right now. I do not judge you, but I cannot imagine a way that you can avoid eternal hellfire if you go to your grave thinking of other children of God, other brothers and sisters for whom Christ died, as “demons” and “ogres.”<br />
<br />
Please. Please talk to your priest about this. This is important, and you need to work on it. No one will care in a month or two what was said on this thread. But your battle with loathing other human beings will still matter. You can’t change abortion politics. You <i>can </i>heal your own heart. Focus on that. It’s what’s practical.<br />
<br />
Yes, abortion is murder. It is vile. But I tell you this. Had some Roman tied the Blessed Virgin to a table and aborted the Christ Child in her womb, I have no doubt that the murdered Christ would have interceded with His Father in Heaven to forgive the abortionist. Because forgiveness is the very core of Who He Is. There is no other Way. None. Narrow is the road that leads to Heaven. Don’t stray from it. Forgive. Love.<br />
<br />
Now. While there’s still time. None of us ever know our own day or hour.<br />
<br />
One more thing, and I hope it helps. When I was a boy, my grandmother and my mother always told me that because Christ is God, His mind was infinite. That meant that in the hours He was on the Cross, He had INFINITE subjective time to devote to me, personally, to offering his Sacrifice just for me. He had infinite time to watch me develop in the womb, go to school, grow up, and live my life. Infinite time to love me more than anyone else ever could, to cherish me and to suffer bitterly at His knowledge of any pain or hurt or sorrow I went through, like a mother pained at seeing her child hurt. Even if I was the only sinner in the whole wide world, Christ would’ve laid down his life just for me. He loves me so much. And you, too.<br />
<br />
But consider this, my brother in Christ. The abortionist is in some ways like Josef Mengele. This is true, and I’m not going to stop saying it no matter how much pro-choicers reject the obvious truth that both the abortionist and Mengele are examples of vivisectionists—people who cut up living human beings without anesthetic.<br />
<br />
You surely agree. But what of Josef Mengele, then? Well, Christ would have laid down his life just for Josef Mengele. Christ would’ve wept tears of pure Heavenly joy if Mengele accepted His grace. Choirs of angels would’ve rejoiced at the salvation of Mengele’s eternal soul. When little Joey Mengele was in the womb, the Crucified had infinite subjective time to watch him grow, to love little Joey so very much. The Crucified watched little Joey Mengele come home from school one day with good grades, and was happy for him. The Crucified saw Mengele’s heart get broken one day by some girl or some career setback or something, and wept for him. Just for him. Christ would’ve done it all, the Incarnation, the Passion, all of it, just for Josef Mengele. He loves him so very much. When Mengele turned to wickedness, Christ looked down from the Cross and wept—not just for Mengele’s victims, but for the infinitely precious, infinitely cherished soul of Josef Mengele. Had that lost sheep come back into the fold, oh, how the Shepherd would’ve rejoiced!<br />
<br />
That is how much Jesus loves you, and me. That is how much Jesus loves Mengele, even still. So is the abortionist a vivisectionist, like Mengele? Yes. That doesn’t make Mengele, or the abortionist, an ogre or a demon. It makes them both beloved—infinitely beloved—children of God.<br />
<br />
Calling people less than human is precisely how the infinitely precious soul of Mengele began its likely descent to Hell. <i>No one</i> is less than human. Not the Jews. Not the unborn. Not you. Not me. Not Mengele. Not the abortionist.<br />
<br />
You are called to love the abortionist. Believe me, Christ loves every single abortionist with a passionate intensity you cannot even begin to fathom. In some way that transcends linear time, we know that the Sacrifice of the Mass, the Divine Liturgy, gives us access to Calvary in an unbloody manner—it allows us to reach across time to that place where Christ is contemplating, with infinite tenderness, the souls of you, and me, and the abortionist, and His beloved Josef Mengele, contemplating us all in infinite love, somehow not 2000 years ago, but right now.<br />
<br />
The way of scorn is Satan’s dark road. Satan is the terrorist, and to hate <i>anyone </i>is to let him win.<br />
<br />
Love. There’s no other Way.<br />
<br />
You have my heartfelt prayers that Our Lord Jesus Christ brings you ever closer to His Merciful Heart. He already loves you so, so much. Just as much as He loves the abortionist.<br />
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<br />Irenisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16870614125489778250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-46265027881002594532015-11-03T11:05:00.001-06:002015-11-03T11:15:35.052-06:00Discourse on method<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span>
<br />
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">A while back, Rod Dreher had a <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/into-the-dark-wood-nominalism-modernity/">post </a>that
led to a discussion in the comments about scientism and related
matters. One of my comments ended up being a sort of book report on </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">Gilson’s <i>Methodical Realism</i>
(“MR”), which I excerpt below the fold with light edits:</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"></span></span></span></span><br />
<a name='more'></a><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">The
Thomist understanding of realism about our “manifest image” (in Sellars’
phrase) of nature ought to be that outlined in </span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif";">“MR”</span>. Gilson describes Descartes as having trapped himself in his own head by
founding his attempt to escape from solipsistic doubt about res extensa upon
the cogito that assured Descartes to his own satisfaction of the existence of
his own res cogitans. Gilson goes on to discuss how post-Cartesian epistemology
assumed Descartes sharp dichotomy between the subjective mental and the
objective physical, so that Locke ended in empiricism (which overemphasizes Descartes’
extended matter), Berkeley in idealism (which overemphasizes Descartes’
cogitative mental), and Hume in skepticism about induction rather opposed to
how science actually operates (despite logical positivism’s later failed effort
to make a go of a Humean “observed regularities” substitute for inductive
ascertainment of causality), and Kant ended up elaborating an
analytic/synthetic distinction that not only paralleled the Cartesian
cogitative/extended distinction, but likewise remained unable to get outside
human subjectivity enough to have any confidence that we are able to grasp
external reality objectively.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">Quine’s
“Two Dogmas of Empiricism” shows Kant’s distinction to be untenable. Part of
what Quine does with that is to propose a coherentist epistemology (and
ontology), which Rorty of course takes in a very pragmatist direction. Gilson
makes a somewhat (only somewhat!) similar move in “MR.” As I reconstruct the
steps in his argument from memory (so don’t trust my ordinals in these
paragraphs), Gilson first notes the traditional Thomist presupposition that our
commonsensical manifest image of reality really does make contact with nature,
because indeed we are part of that nature. (Gilson doesn’t get into this in
“MR,” but part of the context here for me is that the Thomist is a
hylomorphist, so she takes not just the human brain to be a compound of matter
and form, but also, say, a rock. IOW, there is no Cartesian divorce between
mental and material—both our subjective minds and the objective world are part
of a hylomorphic continuum without any radical break: there are no formless
objects, and objects’ forms are what render them intelligible.)</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">Gilson’s
second move is to anticipate the objection that his position amounts to a mere
naïve realism of the Thomas Hutcheson sort, blissfully ignoring the manifold
errors of sense that render the commonsensical manifest image an unreliable
guide to reality. Gilson briskly concedes the occasional deceptions of sense,
and the need to deepen and correct the commonsensical manifest image with the
deliverances of hypothesis and experiment. (E.g., evolution designed us to
perceive a manifest image of a world of medium-sized solid objects like lions
and thrown stones moving at Newtonian speeds at or near the Earth’s surface.
But obviously the lion is made of cells, the solid-seeming stone consists of
atomic nuclei surrounded mostly by empty space, and both would behave
differently at light speed or in microgravity, etc.) </span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">But
third, Gilson then makes a somewhat phenomenological move. (On my own reading,
not in the sense that he explicitly invokes Husserl or something.) He notes
that whatever the errors of sense or the (undisputed!) need to correct and
deepen our manifest image with natural science, it unavoidably remains the case
that such science presupposes our commonsensical ways of knowing if it is to
have any data to interpret and amend. (Again, even the sophisticated instrument
must still have its results read off by some human.)</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">Fourth,
Gilson stresses that the Thomist begins with an ontology of the manifest world,
and then builds an epistemology that presupposes what sort of world we’re in.
This of course “stands Descartes on his head” by beginning with the world
before addressing epistemological worries, rather than beginning with
solipsistic skepticism and then trying (and inevitably failing) to recreate the
world (almost) ex nihilo.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">Fifth,
Gilson says that we have to judge between the merely methodological choice of
starting points made by the Thomist vs. the Cartesian (or Humean or Kantian
trapped in the Cartesian project). Gilson happily concedes that there was
nothing illict in principle about Descartes’ starting from epistemology, or
with founding that epistemology on something like the cogito. It’s a part of
the philosophical landscape that cries out to be explored, and thinkers as
diverse as Pyrrho and Buddha have ventured into nearby regions. But the project
was like the (pre-climate change) quest for a Northwest Passage: worthy trying,
but it turned out that Hudson couldn’t get to Cathay that way. Likewise,
Descartes’ project would’ve been a great philosophical foundation for realism
about the reality of the manifest world (as amended by science) if it had
worked. But after watching geniuses like Kant struggle to complete the project,
we see that it can’t work: it started out from the wrong place, and can’t get
where it wants to go. You cannot get to the world from the cogito.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">Gilson
sums up with the rather pragmatist (again on my own reading, and speaking
loosely) dictum that we ought to judge our philosophical starting points by
their fruit. Despite the best efforts of centuries of work by thinkers of
genius, the Cartesian tree is fruitless. From those roots, we always end up in
the barrenness of Humean or Rortyean skepticism at worst, and in the best case
only in the abortive budding of Kantian epistemology, that posits an
intersubjective reality, but cannot assure itself of its objectivity.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">What
the Thomist does instead is simply to grasp the nettle and say that we must
found our worldview on a trust that the world as revealed to us is real simply
as a methodological axiom. Because when we assume the world is real, we can
start from the world and build an epistemology that explains why it is a
knowable sort of thing. We can start with what the manifest images gets right
(like reading those instruments correctly), and take the errors of sense (the
old chestnut about how a stick looks bent in the water, say) and the
pathologies of the brain (case histories of which are such a morbid focus in
modern philosophy of mind) as special cases of these. What the Thomist takes
the post-Cartesians to do is to take the errors of sense and pathologies of
mind as paradigmatic, and then treat accuracy as a special case of error. (Now,
that is often a great approach in mathematics—where, to take an elementary
example, the point you want on the Cartesian grid is in a sense indeed a
special case of all the points that aren’t the solution to your algebraic
equation—but it sterilizes the tree when applied to epistemology.) </span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">Gilson’s
point ties in with Quine’s. Quine both dissolved Kant’s dichotomy as described
above, and insisted that the foundations of science are ultimately no more
solid than those of a methodology for spinning a coherent web of beliefs,
rather than an immediate grasp of the objectively real. Gilson (again, without
any explicit citation of phenomenology, coherentism, or pragmatism—those
parallels are my own) makes a similar point: realism about external reality is
merely a method for finding facts, and thus cannot ever be a fact found by our
method.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">Science
is a method for discerning and classifying the ontological furniture of
reality. Likewise, philosophy is a method for classifying what we discern in
contemplation of our manifest (and scientifically amended) image of the world,
and theology for classifying what, say, the mystic or the Bible reveals about
God, and pure mathematics for discovering and classifying mathematical ideas.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">All
of these are methodologies, and none of these methodologies is obviously (a key
qualification) in a position to stand in judgment over the others. Decision
between them, or synthesis of their deliverances, is a sort of
“meta-methodological” inquiry, if you will. </span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">How
to begin such an inquiry? Well, in a completely different context, MacIntyre
talks in many of his books about aporiai in different ethical traditions. For
instance, in <i>Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry</i> (“3RV)”, MacIntyre
says that, say, the Nietzchean, the scientific positivist utilitarian (whom
MacIntyre confusingly [to any Diderot scholar, at least] dubs “the
Encyclopedist” after the way the 1911 Britannica allegedly represents this view
as settled Edwardian conventional wisdom), and the Thomist cannot
meta-ethically defeat each other, because their starting points are
incommensurable, their axiomata like apples and oranges. But as traditions
explore the topology of the landscape of ideas, they (re)discover the same
incessant questions, and then either find a way through them, or hit a wall—the
latter eventuality being of course an aporia. Such an aporia can be a mere
anomaly (like the precession of Mercury for Newtonianism before Einstein came
along) or a failure at the very heart of a tradition’s project, like a failure
to find the Northwest Passage in a tradition whose overriding goal is to do
just that. MacIntyre then steps back and looks at the internal history of the
Thomist synthesis, which he characterizes (IIRC) as more or less Aquinas
transcending (ethical) aporiai in Aristotle with Augustine, and vice-versa. He
then takes that sort of meta-ethical success as a paradigm for how we ought to
adjudge rival traditions, and unsurprisingly (I think I can even hear the eyes
rolling in the TAC peanut gallery) claims that Thomism solves various aporiai
for the Nietzchean and the Encyclopedist, and that thus, without even having to
get into meta-ethical quagmires of incommensurables, the Thomist ethicist ought
to be able to convince the Nietzchean or the Encyclopedist of the grander scope
of Thomism on the Nietzchean’s or Encyclopedist’s own terms. (I say “grander
scope” in that the insights of Augustine or Aristotle are kind of enfolded
within the Thomist synthesis as the Thomist understands it, or much, much more
loosely, in the way that Newtonian mechanics is now a special case of quantum
and relativistic theories, which thus also envelop Newton in a grander
tradition). </span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">[MacIntyre doesn’t really deliver on that aporia-solving IOU in 3RV, which is a
problem with a lot of his books, frankly. Look at “After Virtue” (“AV”):
non-aretaic theories are incoherent and misuse the old vocab, therefore a
recovery of virtue ethics would be nice. Someone should totally recover it.
Also, “the therapist” is an unsavory character, and Greek tragedy has a lot of
insight to offer. This is why I recommend Foote’s “Natural Goodness” to the
aretao-curious now, and not AV, even though it’s obviously a great book, and a
great rec especially for specifically BenOp (as opposed to virtue-ethical)
inquirers wanting to grok the whole “communities with shared, thick
understandings of virtue” bit.]</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">Anyhow,
I think that MacIntyre’s “method of aporiai” (if I may) is applicable beyond
meta-ethics. Obviously, something broadly akin to it is at work in Kuhnian
discernment between scientific paradigms (like in the clichéd Newton/Einstein
Mercury example I cited above). And I think Quine’s coherentism (and even the
more sensible insights of Rorty’s pragmatism) are both (very, very broadly) in
the same ballpark with regard to the sort of “meta-epistemological” or
“meta-methodological” disputes I’m talking about above. </span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">And
thus MacIntyre, for me, complements Gilson: the Cartesian stance is fruitless
(ending in skepticism and relativism), but Thomist methodical realism allows us
to build a workable ontology (yielding a workable epistemology)—it bears fruit.
Thus, the method of aporiai allows the seeker after philosophical foundations
to follow Christ’s adage to judge a tree by its fruit.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">Occam’s
Razor could be unsheathed now, and a partisan of scientism could comment that
Thomism may “work” insofar as it generates an ontology, but that it’s dysfunctional
because the ontology it generates is full of made-up nonsense (souls, God,
forms, teloi, etc.) that don’t actually exist. And that’s a very fair
complaint! But I have to get back to work. So, like MacIntyre, I’ll just say
that I think the Thomist ontology both better saves the phenomena (gets through
the aporiai) and is a defensible account of what really does exist. But I’ll
pull a MacIntyre and leave that as an IOU for another thread or blog post.
(Quoth Arrian’s “Anabasis” [IIRC ], “Men never hold themselves to the standards
of Alexander’s courage or generalship, but how quick they are to imitate his
drunkenness, and plead his example as excuse!” Thus me and MacIntyre. Sorry,
folks.)</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;">So
here, I just want to argue that “science is true” is an assertion that:</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;"><br />
1. Ought to be judged “meta-methodologically,” without presuming the
methodology of science itself; and</span></span></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "serif"; font-size: normal;"><br />
2. Ought to have this meta-methadological judgment in its turn judged by
whether Gilson’s methodical realist account of Thomism does a better job coping
with the aporiai noted by the likes of Descartes, Hume, Kant, Popper, or Quine
(and maybe, maybe Rorty) than science’s own internal resources can do in
solving these aporiai identified by these more (or less!) “pro-science”
thinkers following science’s own internal logic and modern (post-Cartesian)
workaday scientists’ usual self-understanding of the foundations of their
field.</span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><br /></span></span></span></span></div>
Irenisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16870614125489778250noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-77024808838671550262015-10-16T14:37:00.001-05:002015-10-16T14:50:34.853-05:00Something for the Synod on the Family to mull overFrom today's Office of Readings:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[Y]ou cover the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping and wailing,
because He now refuses to consider the offering or to accept it from
your hands. And you ask, "Why?" </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It is because the Lord stands as witness
between you and the wife of your youth, the wife with whom you have
broken faith, even though she was your partner and your wife by
covenant. Did He not create a single being that has flesh and the breath
of life? And what is this single being destined for? God-given
offspring. Be careful for your own life, therefore, and do not break
faith with the wife of your youth. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
For I hate divorce, says the Lord the
God of Israel, and I hate people to parade their sins on their cloaks,
says the Lord of Hosts. Respect your own life, therefore, and do not
break faith like this.</blockquote>
--Malachi, 2:13-16<br />
<br />
So those who betray their one-flesh union ought not to parade their sins before the altar of the Lord in expectation that the Lord will find their participation in the Sacrifice on the altar acceptable. The pastoral application regarding reception of the Holy Eucharist by the divorced and remarried is left as an exercise for the reader. Irenisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16870614125489778250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-15340300884828636942015-10-10T18:47:00.000-05:002015-10-10T18:47:03.169-05:00Nomenclatural housekeeping noteI finally got around to creating a gmail address as "Irenist," because almost everyone I interact with online knows me under that handle, so signing my posts as "Tom" (my IRL name) felt odd. Future posts and comments will (assuming I remember which account I'm logged into) be posted as Irenist.Irenisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16870614125489778250noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-55721524248019140712015-09-18T11:59:00.001-05:002015-09-18T11:59:07.165-05:00Prattle of ToursI've been reading the "History of the Franks" by the sixth-century chronicler, Bishop Gregory of Tours. Gregory has a number of interesting things to say, and I'll keep adding to this post as I notice things.
To start us off, Gregory's first book, as so often with medieval annalists and chroniclers, begins with the history recounted in the Bible and classical sources, in order to situate the local and recent within the context of the universal and ancient.
Gregory makes two Biblical points that, although perhaps not original to him, were new to me (or if not, I had forgotten them) and quite interesting:
<blockquote>[As Adam] slept a rib was taken from him and the woman, Eve, was created. There is no doubt that this first man Adam before he sinned typified the Redeemer. For as the Redeemer slept in the stupor of suffering and caused water and blood to issue from his side, he brought into existence the virgin and unspotted church, redeemed by blood, purified by water, having no spot or wrinkle, that is, washed with water to avoid a spot, stretched on the cross to avoid a wrinkle.</blockquote>
This analogy (Adam's rib:Eve :: Christ's side: His Bride the Church) is delightful, and for me novel. Indeed, much as the aqedah (Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac) really makes sense only in light of God's sacrifice of His Own Son (on the same mountain, some say), so the conjugal union of Adam and Eve as prefigurement of Christ and the Church makes sense of what otherwise seems a rather odd and unmotivated part of the Creation story. In both cases, what looks arbitrary and absurd in the Hebrew Bible taken alone looks artful and profound when placed in the Bible's key context: Christ.
<blockquote>For forty years... the Israelites dwelt in the desert and familiarized themselves with their laws, and lived on the food of the angels. Once they had assimilated the Law, they crossed the Jordan with Joshua and were given permission to enter the Promised Land.</blockquote>
St. Paul often inverts Old Testament dichotomies so that, e.g., instead of Isaac standing for Israel and Ishmael for the gentiles, Paul, contra the literal genealogies, has Ishmael stand for Israel, and Isaac for the Christian Church. Something similar might be in Gregory's mind here. As we know, of all the Old Testament figures from whom Christ might've taken His name, He chose to be born with the name of Joshua (identical to Jesus when both are in the Aramaic or Hebrew). And Joshua is the conqueror, who, like Christus Victor, leads the people beyond what Moses can give them and into the Promised Land. And so in Gregory, we see that the Law had to be assimilated before the people were ready for Joshua to lead them into the Promise. And this is precisely how Christianity views Jewish monotheism: as a legalistic particularism necessary to build up enough awe of the One God distinct from pagan idols, such that when Christ came, His identity would be a Trinitarian shock, and not merely assimilated to some local pantheon like a Dionysus or Krishna figure. And thus, we have the long years of "assimilating the Law" identified, in Pauline fashion, not with the Promised Land, but with the wandering in the desert that needed to precede it.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-74056062877945168322015-08-29T14:30:00.000-05:002015-08-29T14:31:17.393-05:00Myth-taken<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Back in June, over at Charles Stross' blog, guest blogger Hugh Hancock <a href="http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2015/06/they-took-our-myths.html">asked</a> why <a href="http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/">Lovecraft's</a> Cthulhu Mythos is so popular a setting for "shared universe" fiction, and answered:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">The Cthulhu Mythos is almost 100 years old. [But] it's the most modern part of our mythology that we're allowed to access....</span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">It's not terribly uncommon -- to put it mildly -- to see articles complaining about Hollywood's unoriginality. Hollywood puts out sequel after sequel, and when the studios do vary things by starting on "new" material, it's usually material that has been proven in another medium, from the </span><i style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Hunger Games</i><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> to </span><i style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Guardians of the Galaxy....</i><br />
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">I think Hollywood's onto something, and has been for some time. And that thing is mythology.</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">From <i>Star Wars</i>, to the Marvelverse, to - well, every other thing with a "-verse" after it - the biggest movies are those which tap into a mythic quality. Often they'll simply hint at other parts of the universe, at mythic heroes or elements of their universe with powerful resonance....</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">As storytellers, we want to interact with the myths of our age. They have a meaning beyond just the stories, serving as filters for universal archetypes. And they need to be **set* before they can be used: a new character in a new world doesn't have the power of myth, but a character we've grown up with as a god-like figure in our stories does....</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">But most of our myths are locked up beyond our reach.</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Thanks to various intellectual property laws, notably copyright, any mythic figure created after approximately 1920 has a unique custodian. That's an incredibly powerful position, and it's responsible for the positions of most of the nobility of storytelling today. In the film world and the comics world, in particular, there are sharp deliniations between the studios -- the myth-holders, the nobles -- and everyone else.</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">The former can make far more money than the latter. Why? Because of their hold on our myths. The public hungers to see tales of their mythic heroes, as they have throughout history. It's an incredibly powerful draw, and possibly the only thing sustaining the top-heavy world of moviemaking as it is today.</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">But the result is that storytellers can't access most of their mythworld. We reach for our mythic figures, but we can't touch them; at least, not without risking legal battles that we'll almost certainly lose. And we definitely, definitely can't do what storytellers have been doing for the rest of humanity's existence, which is tell tales of our myths for money....</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">And so we reach for the most recent myths we can access: things that still have some mythic resonance, even if that resonance is faded in comparison to James Bond, <i>Star Wars</i> or Middle Earth.</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">And the most recent mythic tales with any great power? The Cthulhu Mythos. Reaching further back, there are a few more; vampire fiction supplies a few, of which Dracula is by far the best known, and Sherlock Holmes is another.</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">We can also attempt to tell tales of more recent myths with the serial numbers filed off. The wave of fantasy fiction in the '80s and arguably the rise of D&D both demonstrate that. But it's not as powerful, nor as satisfying.</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">And we can create our own mythic figures and attempt to rise to the nobility. That's been the path for most really successful novelists, from Charlie's <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/TheLaundrySeries">Laundryverse</a> (there's that -verse suffix again) to J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter, to Iain M. Banks' <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series">Culture</a>, George R. R. Martin's <i>Song Of Ice And Fire</i>, and so on....</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Of course, there's a real danger here. As time marches forward, thanks to the magic of ever-extending copyright terms, the list of myths that we've got access to remains static. They become steadily less useful as myths for our current culture. For example, it's been noticable over the last couple of decades that the Cthulhu Mythos' original obsession with secretive, backward cults of non-white people has become more and more of a problem.</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">But there's no real prospect that anything's going to successfully change that status quo in the near future....</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Will Cthulhu ever become less popular? Only if copyright terms stop extending, and Disney's prevented that so far.</span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><br /></span></span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">So, oddly enough, the fate of Cthulhu rests with Mickey Mouse.</span></span></blockquote>
<span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Hancock points to one of the many serious problems with Disney's lobbying of Congress for ever longer copyright terms (as long as it takes to keep Mickey Mouse, first introduced in the 1928 silent film </span><i style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steamboat_Willie">Steamboat Willie</a></i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">, out of the public domain), terms </span><a href="https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">likely to go nigh-irrevocably global soon in the wake of successful negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership free trade agreement</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Of course, long before modern <a href="https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/zoomcomic.html">I.P. law</a>, artists were already forced to forge their own myths. And this is a new situation, and one that comes with secularity. As Charles Taylor explains in the tenth chapter of <i>A Secular Age</i>:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">The creation of this free space has been made possible in large part by the shift in the place and understanding of art that came in the Romantic period. This is related to the shift from an understanding of art as mimesis to one that stresses creation. It concerns what one could call the languages of art, that is, the publicly available reference points that, say, poets and painters draw on. As Shakespeare could draw on the correspondences to make us feel the full horror of the act of regicide, to recur to the case I cited above. He has a servant report the "unnatural" events that have been evoked in sympathy with this terrible deed: the night in which Duncan is murdered is an unruly one, with "lamentings heard i' the air; strange screams of death", and it remains dark even though the day should have started. On the previous Tuesday a falcon had been killed by a mousing owl, and Duncans horses turned wild in the night, "Contending 'gainst obedience, as they would / Make war with mankind." In a similar way, painting could draw on the publicly understood objects of divine and secular history, events and personages which had heightened mean¬ing, as it were, built into them, like the Madonna and Child or the oath of the Horatii.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">But for a couple of centuries now we have been living in a world in which these points of reference no longer hold for us. Few now believe the doctrine of the correspondences, as this was accepted in the Renaissance, and neither divine or secular history has a generally accepted significance. It is not that one cannot write a poem about the correspondences. Precisely, Baudelaire did.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> It is rather that this can't draw on the simple acceptance of the formerly public doctrines. The poet himself didn't subscribe to them in their canonical form. He is getting at something different, some personal vision he is trying to triangulate to through this historical reference, the "forest of symbols" that he sees in the world around him. But to grasp this forest, we need to understand not so much the erstwhile public doctrine (about which no one remembers any details anyway) but, as we might put it, the way it resonates in the poet's sensibility. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">To take another example, Rilke speaks of angels. But his angels are not to be understood by their place in the traditionally defined order. Rather, we have to triangulate to the meaning of the term through the whole range of images with which Rilke articulates his sense of things. "Wer, wenn Ich schrie, horte mich, aus der Engel Ordnungen?", begin the </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Duino Elegies</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">. Their being beyond these cries partly defines these angels. We cannot get at them through a mediaeval treatise on the ranks of cherubim and seraphim, but we have to pass through this articulation of Rilke's sensibility.</span><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">We could describe the change in this way: where formerly poetic language could rely on certain publicly available orders of meaning, it now has to consist in a language of articulated sensibility. Earl Wasserman has shown how the decline of the old order with its established background of meanings made necessary the development of new poetic languages in the Romantic period. Pope, for instance, in his </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Windsor Forest</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">, could draw on age-old views of the order of nature as a commonly available source of poetic images. For Shelley, this resource is no longer available; the poet must articulate his own world of references, and make them believable. As Wasserman explains it, "Until the end of the eighteenth century there was sufficient intellectual homogeneity for men to share certain assumptions ... In varying degrees, ... men accepted ... the Christian interpretation of history, the sacramentalism of nature, the Great Chain of Being, the analogy of the various planes of creation, the conception of man as microcosm.... These were cosmic syntaxes in the public domain; and the poet could afford to think of his art as imitative of 'nature' since these patterns were what he meant by 'nature'.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">"By the nineteenth century these world-pictures had passed from consciousness. The change from a mimetic to a creative conception of poetry is not merely a critical philosophical phenomenon ... Now ... an additional formulative act was required of the poet. ... Within itself the modern poem must both formulate its cosmic syntax and shape the autonomous poetic reality that the cosmic syntax permits; 'nature', which was once prior to the poem and available for imitation, now shares with the poem a common origin in the poet's creativity."</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"></span></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">The Romantic poets and their successors have to articulate an original vision of the cosmos. When Wordsworth and Hölderlin describe the natural world around us, in </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">The Prelude</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">, </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">The Rhine</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">, or </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Homecoming</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">, they no longer play on an established gamut of references, as Pope could still do in </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">Windsor Forest</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">. They make us aware of something in nature for which there are as yet no established words.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;"> The poems are finding words for us. In this "subtler language" — the term is borrowed from Shelley — something is defined and created as well as manifested. A watershed has been passed in the history of literature.</span></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, serif; line-height: 20.7999992370605px;">There are many far more important benefits to being a Catholic Christian. But among the fringe benefits: at least our mythos isn't copyrighted!</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-33915239652558188442015-07-07T19:49:00.004-05:002015-07-08T09:17:45.236-05:00Tea TheodicyGod is perfect. Indeed, He is Perfection.<br />
<br />
What would be interesting for a Perfect Artist to create? The imperfect:<br />
<br />
<i><br /></i>
He is an Artist:<br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>Hath not the Potter power over the clay, of the same lump, to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?</i><br />
--Romans 9:21<br />
<br />
The imperfect does not fail to please Him:<br />
<br />
<i>He said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for My strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. </i><br />
--2 Corinthians 12:9<br />
<br />
What sort of art is this?<br />
<br />
<i>Wabi sabi is the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete, the antithesis of our classical Western notion of beauty as something perfect, enduring, and monumental. </i><br />
--Leonard Koren<br />
<br />
<br />
<i>Wabi sabi is an ancient aesthetic philosophy rooted in Zen Buddhism, particularly the tea ceremony, a ritual of purity and simplicity in which masters prized bowls that were handmade and irregularly shaped, with uneven glaze, cracks, and a perverse beauty in their deliberate imperfection. The Japanese philosophy celebrates beauty in what's natural, flaws and all. The antique bowls above are prized because of (not in spite of) their drips and cracks. What if we learned to prize the drips and cracks in our messy lives? </i><br />
--Gretchen Roberts<br />
<br />
<i>Wabi-sabi understands the tender, raw beauty of a gray December landscape and the aching elegance of an abandoned building or shed. It celebrates cracks and crevices and rot and all the other marks that time and weather and use leave behind. To discover wabi-sabi is to see the singular beauty in something that may first look decrepit and ugly. Wabi-sabi reminds us that we are all transient beings on this planet—that our bodies, as well as the material world around us, are in the process of returning to dust. Nature’s cycles of growth, decay, and erosion are embodied in frayed edges, rust, liver spots. Through wabi-sabi, we learn to embrace both the glory and the melancholy found in these marks of passing time.</i><br />
--Robin Griggs Lawrence<br />
<br />
<i>The tea-room (the Sukiya) does not pretend to be other than a mere cottage—a straw hut, as we call it....an Abode of the Unsymmetrical inasmuch as it is consecrated to the worship of the Imperfect, purposely leaving some thing unfinished for the play of the imagination to complete.</i><br />
--Okakura Kakuzō<br />
<br />
But what if this imperfection is something more? Okakura tells us that "Perfection is everywhere if we only choose to recognise it."<br />
<br />
Evoking the perfection in imperfection the tea master Sen no Rikyū often used to quote a poem by Fujiwara Ietaka:<br />
<br />
<i>Show them who wait</i><br />
<i>Only for flowers</i><br />
<i>There in the mountain villages:</i><br />
<i>Grass peeks through the snow,</i><br />
<i>And with it, spring.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
Perhaps everywhere we look we see agony and death, we see the Cross. But of such does God make Easter, of such cracked tea cups does the Potter make perfect art. By His grace, in our weakness is His power.<br />
<br />
Do you see snow? Look again: a field of white lilies.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-25708048213191264722015-06-04T00:00:00.000-05:002015-06-04T00:00:05.377-05:00Leading from behind<i>Place Uriah in the front line of the fiercest battle and withdraw from him, so that he may be struck down and die</i>. --2 Samuel 11:15<br />
<br />
<i>If we see that Germany is
winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to
help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.</i> --Harry S Truman, 1941<br />
<br />
Various commentators of the neo-con, interventionist sort (y'know, "serious," mainstream commentators) have faulted the Obama Administration for a while now for not warring more directly on the Assad regime in Syria. Now that the Saudis and Turks are funding and arming al-Qaeda linked militants, and those militants (along with ISIS militants) are making greater progress against the Assad regime, the <a href="http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/05/29/assad-in-trouble-as-last-town-in-idlib-falls/">new neo-con line</a> seems to be that we're going to miss our piece of the action if Sunni radicals do all the anti-Assad fighting and dying for us.<br />
<br />
Now as it happens, I will be somewhat sorry to see the murderous Assad regime go, because it seems to be <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/genocide-syria-christians/">the only protector of Christians in Syria</a>.<br />
<br />
But assuming for argument's sake that the fall of Assad is desirable (to check Iran or whatever), why exactly is it a problem if it's jihadis dying for that cause, rather than Americans? Is it supposed to be because the jihadis will then have more influence in a post-Assad Syria? But if that's the case, how is it any different than Libya, where we followed the interventionist script and ended up with more jihadi influence than under Qaddafi? For that matter, how is it any different than Iraq, where we have ended up with more jihadi influence than under Hussein? It seems to me that we are going to have more jihadi influence in the Arab world until Arabs themselves weary of them. So why not let jihadis and Baathists slaughter each other in the meantime, rather than having Americans be involved? As Kissinger is said to have quipped of the Iran-Iraq War--can't they both lose?<br />
<br />
I think the obviously correct analysis of what the Administration is trying to do here here isn't some sort of liberal timidity (as if the party of drone war, the Carter Doctrine, and Vietnam were really noninterventionist anyway), but rather the one Perry Anderson offers in his (excellent) new book <i>American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers</i>, reflecting conditions as of its composition in 2013, but still plausible today:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The safer path was a proxy war, at two removes. The <span class="smallcaps">US</span> would not intervene directly, nor even itself—for the time being—arm or
train the Syrian rebels. It would rely instead on Qatar and Saudi
Arabia to funnel weapons and funds to them, and Turkey and Jordan to
host and organize them.</blockquote>
<br />
There's a great deal of loose talk among neocons (many of them working at Gulf-funded think tanks, I imagine) about some sort of dangerous split between the U.S. and the Gulf princedoms. But Anderson's picture of the U.S. and the Arab royals working hand-in-glove rings a lot truer than the spleen being vented by the Gulf royals' American mouthpieces.<br />
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Not, of course, that we mere citizens have much power over the steady course of the national security establishment's plans for continuing imperial hegemony. Just nice to call out obvious cant for what it is once in a while, if only to stay sane. Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-17878386021092615182015-06-03T00:00:00.000-05:002015-06-03T00:00:08.817-05:00War (of the Stray Dog) in HeavenI would not have returned to the Faith as an adult were it not for discovering <a href="http://wmbriggs.com/post/category/samt/">Aquinas' proofs of God</a>, and I would not have come to Aquinas' proofs were it not for the Thomistic popularizer and reinvigorator <a href="http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/07/classical-theism-roundup.html">Edward Feser</a>. Accordingly, I owe Feser an incalculable debt.<br />
<br />
Feser has feuded in print with Orthodox theologian <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/featured-author/david-b-hart">David Bentley Hart</a>, whom I also esteem for his splendid contributions to contemporary theology.<br />
<br />
Their most recent slapfight--<a href="http://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/04/vinculum-magnum-entis">here</a>, <a href="http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/04/14777/">here</a>, <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/06/romans-81922">here</a>, and <a href="http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/05/15027/">here</a>--concerns whether animals go to Heaven.<br />
<br />
Besides a general disdain for (a caricature of) neo-Thomist manualism, Hart's thrusts attack the Thomist point that animals do not go to Heaven because their souls are not immaterial.<br />
<br />
This point runs roughly as follows:<br />
<br />
The soul, for a hylemorphist (i.e., an Aristotelian who believes that matter is structured by form) is the form of the body--the organization of its faculties.<br />
<br />
The form of a rubber ball is, <i>inter alia</i>, its sphericity.<br />
<br />
The form of a plant is its <i>vegetative soul</i>, the way that its matter is organized and in<i>form</i>ed unto nutrition, growth, and reproduction.<br />
<br />
The form of an animal is its <i>sensitive soul</i>, which includes all the vegetative functions, but also informs animal functions of sensation, locomotion, appetition, emotion, and imagination.<br />
<br />
The form of a human is his or her <i>rational soul</i>, which includes all the animal (and thus all the vegetative) functions, but also informs the human function of reason.<br />
<br />
Now, modern science will confirm Aristotle's and Aquinas' view that vegetative and sensitive faculties are entirely embodied: they work in and through matter, and without matter, they do not work.<br />
<br />
Reason is different. As the contemporary Thomist James Ross has argued in <i><a href="http://www3.nd.edu/~afreddos/courses/43151/ross-immateriality.pdf">Immaterial Aspects of Thought</a></i> (one of the most important readings in my own intellectual development as a Thomist and indeed as a Christian), reason incorporates a degree of abstraction and precision that the material, of its nature, cannot entirely embody.<br />
<br />
Because reason is immaterial, the rational soul which instantiates it must, Aquinas rightly reasoned, be immaterial, too, as the vegetative and animal souls are not.<br />
<br />
Now, animals have imagination and emotion, but they do not reason. They can be taught to communicate, but they do not make logical inferences or engage in mathematical theorization. An animal's mind is entirely exhausted by the hylemorphic form/matter compound of its brain, with no "naked form," no solely immaterial aspect, left over.<br />
<br />
Thus, reasons the Thomist, dogs don't go to heaven. (Or cats to hell.) They cannot: Heaven and Hell are immaterial realities, and a dog has no immaterial soul.<br />
<br />
Thus the Thomist, and so thus Feser. Hart is outraged at this slight to our animal brethren, and cites the Bible ("the lion shall lay down with the lamb," etc.) against it. Hart reminds us that the Kingdom of God will involve the restoration of <i>all</i> Creation. And it indeed it shall. But.<br />
<br />
The feud has gone on for some time, and neither Feser nor Hart has drawn what seems to me to be the crucial distinction between Heaven and the General Resurrection.<br />
<br />
When you die, we may hope that you go to Heaven. There, you will exist immaterially, as Aquinas teaches. But at the end of history, all the dead shall be raised. The sheep shall be separated from the goats. The saints shall live in glorified resurrection bodies in the New Jerusalem, and the damned shall burn: both the joy of the saints and the agonies of the damned shall be embodied, somehow--real pleasure, real burning.<br />
<br />
There will be no dogs in Heaven, because there cannot be. But will there be dogs, will there be lions and lambs, in the general resurrection? Well, why not?<br />
<br />
Just as the glorified body of the Risen Lord and of His Mother assumed bodily into Heaven (in a way that dogs very much are not) is not the corruptible, agonized and agonizing body we bear today, so the resurrected lion and lamb need not dwell in <a href="http://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/2009/02/did-god-create-ichneumonideae.html">ichneumonidaean</a> agony anymore.<br />
<br />
In sum, I think Feser and Hart, two heroes of mine, are simply arguing past each other. Feser is right, with Aquinas, to affirm that there are no dogs in Heaven. Hart is right to affirm, with the Fathers, that there may indeed be animals in the Kingdom. But the Kingdom, in its fullness, is not the rest of the righteous in Heaven, but the glory of the saints in the general resurrection after Doomsday.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-53524665477393718242015-06-02T00:00:00.001-05:002015-06-02T00:00:06.343-05:00(Star) War(s) is HellI suppose it's not very <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/benedict-option/">BenOp</a> of me, but I let my toddler watch <i>Star Wars</i>. She's pretty obsessed with it now. "I want watch bobots" is pretty much a nightly refrain around here: she does like her daily dose of Luke, "Dark Hater" ("He's Luke's daddy; you're <i>my </i>daddy"), and especially "Bobot Fett"--kid has great taste already. (It's also probably not very traditionalist of me that I'm proud of her for wanting to be a Jedi instead of a princess, but she does, I am, and that's that.)<br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Anyhow, I've had <i>a lot</i> of time lately to ponder all six episodes of Lucas' <i>magnum opus</i>. (If you had told pubescent me that it was possible to get sick of <i>Star Wars</i>, he wouldn't have believed you. He would have been wrong.) In addition to their surprising usefulness in teaching my daughter to stay the heck away from fire (Anakin's fate in <i>Revenge of the Sith</i>:"fire hot; give him bad boo-boos; I not touch fire") and electricity (Luke's torment in <i>Return of the Jedi</i>: "tricity hurt Luke; Emperr not nice"), the third and sixth episodes contain some perhaps useful object lessons about evil.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
In particular, one of the thoughts I've had watching (and watching, and watching) all this <i>Star Wars</i> is that there are a two moments in Lucas' hexad that neatly encapsulate some of C.S. Lewis' insights about Satan.</div>
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First, consider the two main villains Luke Skywalker encounters in <i>Return of the Jedi</i>: first Jabba the Hutt in his palace and on his pleasure barge, and then Emperor Palpatine (along with Darth Vader, of course) on his Death Star. </div>
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The corpulent Jabba looks like gluttony incarnate, and his palace and "pleasure" barge host his lustful, perverse penchant for keeping enslaved dancing girls. Jabba embodies the sins of the flesh. He's also rather easily defeated.</div>
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Now consider Palpatine. Hatred, pride, envy--those are the sins to which he tempts, enthroned in his cold technological lair. And defeating him is much, much costlier--Luke nearly dies, and his father does die.</div>
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That contrast in <i>Return of the Jedi</i> reminds me of this passage from Lewis' <i>Mere Christianity</i>:</div>
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The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.</blockquote>
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Second, consider the infamous "<a href="http://www.themarysue.com/do-not-want-origin/">Do Not Want</a>!" scene near the conclusion of <i>Revenge of the Sith</i>. Palpatine, the diabolical puppet-master of all six films, tempted Anakin Skywalker to the dark side by promising that if only he would give in to Palpatine's temptation, Anakin could employ dark arts to save his pregnant wife, Padme, from death during childbirth. Anakin turns to the dark side, chokes his wife nearly to death out of jealousy and rage, and gets himself brutally burned after pridefully challenging his erstwhile Jedi master in a duel. Awakening as a shell of his former self, mummified alive in a cybernetic life support suit, Anakin (now Darth Vader) asks, "Where is Padme? Is she safe? Is she all right?"</div>
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Palpatine replies with perverse nonchalance that, "It seems in your anger, you killed her."</div>
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Vader says, "I...? I couldn't have! She was alive... I felt it!" He bursts the bonds holding him to the operating table, and lashes out with the dark side of the Force to crush much of the bric-a-brac in the operating room--empowered to rage so, but impotent to bring back the woman, and the wonderful life, that he cast aside. As Vader yells "Noooooo!" in one of Lucas' tale's moments of deepest pathos (and film's moments of deepest bathos), Palpatine's cowl hides a smirk.</div>
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Despite the bathetic lapse in mood of Vader's endless "Noooooooooooooooo!", this scene is about the best cinematic representation I've ever come across of a key passage from Lewis' <i>Screwtape Letters</i>, in which the demonic tempter instructs another demon in the dark arts of temptation thus (keeping in mind that for Screwtape, "the Enemy" is God, and the "Father," the devil):</div>
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In the first place I have always found that the Trough periods of the human undulation provide excellent opportunity for all sensual temptations, particularly those of sex. This may surprise you, because, of course, there is more physical energy, and therefore more potential appetite, at the Peak periods; but you must remember that the powers of resistance are then also at their highest. The health and spirits which you want to use in producing lust can also, alas, be very easily used for work or play or thought or innocuous merriment. The attack has a much better chance of success when the man’s whole inner world is drab and cold and empty. And it is also to be noted that the Trough sexuality is subtly different in quality from that of the Peak—much less likely to lead to the milk and water phenomenon which the humans call “being in love”, much more easily drawn into perversions, much less contaminated by those generous and imaginative and even spiritual concomitants which often render human sexuality so disappointing. It is the same with other desires of the flesh. You are much more likely to make your man a sound drunkard by pressing drink on him as an anodyne when he is dull and weary than by encouraging him to use it as a means of merriment among his friends when he is happy and expansive. Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula. It is more certain; and it’s better style. <i>To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return</i>—that is what really gladdens our Father’s heart. And the troughs are the time for beginning the process.</blockquote>
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Palpatine gets Anakin's soul and gives him <i>nothing </i>in return. Palpatine is among the most purely satanic characters on film. And miserable, duped Anakin among the better object lessons for us sinners.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-31697920934723494312015-06-01T00:00:00.000-05:002015-06-01T00:00:01.767-05:00ClippyCorp<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: justify;">
<i>For our wrestling is not against flesh and blood; but against principalities and powers, against the rulers of the world of this darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places.</i><br />
--Ephesians 6:12</blockquote>
In my recent <a href="http://www.irenist.com/2015/05/the-smoke-of-satan.html">post</a> on our liber(al)tarian moment, I mentioned Charles Stross' idea that we live under a <a href="http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/political-failure-modes-and-th.html">beige dictatorship</a> in which representative democracy has been captured by corporate interests to the point where the U.K. political system under which he lives, like the partisan duopoly here in the States, and indeed like political systems throughout the developed world, no longer offers any real access to those actors and ideas that would really, truly rock the boat. In his post on the beige dictatorship, Stross links to another of his posts, in which he likens corporations to <a href="http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invaders-from-mars.html">invaders from Mars</a>; it's too insightful not to quote almost in full:<br />
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The rot set in back in the 19th century, when the US legal system began <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Corporate_personhood">recognizing corporations as de facto people</a>. Fast forward past the collapse of the ancien regime, and into modern second-wave colonialism: once the USA grabbed the mantle of global hegemon from the bankrupt British empire in 1945, they naturally exported their corporate model worldwide, as US diplomatic (and military) muscle was used to promote access to markets on behalf of US corporations. </blockquote>
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Corporations do not share our priorities. They are hive organisms constructed out of teeming workers who join or leave the collective: those who participate within it subordinate their goals to that of the collective, which pursues the three corporate objectives of growth, profitability, and pain avoidance. (The sources of pain a corporate organism seeks to avoid are lawsuits, prosecution, and a drop in shareholder value.) </blockquote>
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Corporations have a mean life expectancy of around 30 years, but are potentially immortal; they live only in the present, having little regard for past or (thanks to short term accounting regulations) the deep future: and they generally exhibit a sociopathic lack of empathy. </blockquote>
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Collectively, corporate groups lobby international trade treaty negotiations for operating conditions more conducive to pursuing their three goals. They bully individual lawmakers through overt channels (with the ever-present threat of unfavourable news coverage) and covert channels (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/us/politics/22scotus.html">political campaign donations</a>). The general agreements on tariffs and trade, and subsequent treaties defining new propertarian realms, once implemented in law, define the macroeconomic climate: national level politicians thus no longer control their domestic economies. </blockquote>
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Corporations, not being human, lack patriotic loyalty; with a free trade regime in place they are free to move wherever taxes and wages are low and profits are high. We have seen this recently in Ireland where, despite a <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/8187614/Irelands-austerity-budget-the-key-points.html">brutal austerity budget</a>, <a href="http://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/item/19501-corporation-tax-to-stay-at/">corporation tax</a> is not to be raised lest multinationals desert for warmer climes. </blockquote>
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For a while the Communist system held this at bay by offering a rival paradigm, however faulty, for how we might live: but with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 — and the adoption of state corporatism by China as an engine for development — large scale opposition to the corporate system withered. </blockquote>
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We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals. They have enormous media reach, which they use to distract attention from threats to their own survival. They also have an enormous ability to support litigation against public participation, except in the very limited circumstances where such action is forbidden. Individual atomized humans are thus either co-opted by these entities (you can live very nicely as a CEO or a politician, as long as you don't bite the feeding hand) or steamrollered if they try to resist. </blockquote>
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In short, we are living in the aftermath of an alien invasion.</blockquote>
Stross' point about corporate personhood is well taken, and one to which I have been sympathetic throughout the years since I worked for the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader_presidential_campaign,_2000">Nader-LaDuke</a> campaign alongside a <a href="http://www.poclad.org/">POCLAD</a> activist. But I would caveat the point, not least to stress the value of <a href="http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/constructive">constructive</a> legal personhood for corporate bodies like labor unions, political parties, and the Church (which, of course, is in fact the <i><a href="http://www.dictionaryofspiritualterms.com/public/Glossaries/terms.aspx?ID=1138">corpus mysticum</a></i> of Christ, and so a "corporate person" in a real as well as a constructive legal sense). Indeed, even the constructive personhood at law of joint stock corporations has allowed for economic dynamism that would not exist otherwise, and whatever the many <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2012/12/yes-lewis-compared-modern-science-to-demonology">Faustian</a> <a href="http://www.holyspiritinteractive.net/columns/markshea/sheavings/38.asp">horrors</a> of Mammon-enabled scientism and science-enabled holocaust, we can and ought to thank capitalist modernity for <a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon">the relief of man's estate</a>.<br />
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But even with those caveats, Stross is right that profit-driven corporations function in our global society as autonomous <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superorganism">superorganisms</a> who rule us with a cold, calculative agenda not our own. In this, they are apt tools of the Prince of this World. Thus, when we struggle for social justice, against the porn-ification of pop culture, and for a humane, distributist local economics, against these corporations, <i>our wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers</i>.<br />
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But however useful the capitalist corporation is to the Enemy, the most useful way for Christians to conceptualize it is perhaps as a variant of <a href="http://lesswrong.com/">Less Wrong's</a> "Clippy." Named for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant">the annoying, failed A.I.</a> that used to pester <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office">Office</a> users with useless suggestions, Clippy is a thought experiment popular among the motley extropians, transhumanists, singularitarians, etc. who spend time over at Less Wrong being catastrophically wrong about <a href="http://www.yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth/">metaphysics</a> and <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/kn/torture_vs_dust_specks/">ethics</a>, <a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/i5/bayesian_judo/">exaggerating the value of Bayesian statistics</a>, being a <a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong">cult </a>(er, "<a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/bql/our_phyg_is_not_exclusive_enough/">phyg</a>") with a <a href="http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-robot-god-apostles-creed-for-less.html">creed</a>, and (most relevantly here) worrying about <a href="http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligence">unfriendly A.I.</a> and trying to prevent it and thereby <a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SavingTheWorld">save the world</a>. Like so much the endearing oddballs at Less Wrong come up with, the present Catholic oddball finds Clippy pretty thought-provoking. (Indeed, for all their oddity, the Less Wrong folks are some of the most interesting, intelligent people thinking and writing right now.) Of Clippy, Less Wrong's community wiki <a href="http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer">tells</a> us that<br />
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The paperclip maximizer is the canonical thought experiment showing how an artificial general intelligence, even one designed competently and without malice, could ultimately destroy humanity. The thought experiment shows that AIs with apparently innocuous values could pose an existential threat. </blockquote>
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The goal of maximizing paperclips is chosen for illustrative purposes because it is very unlikely to be implemented, and has little apparent danger or emotional load (in contrast to, for example, curing cancer or winning wars). This produces a thought experiment which shows the contingency of human values: An extremely powerful optimizer (a highly intelligent agent) could seek goals that are completely alien to ours (orthogonality thesis), and as a side-effect destroy us by consuming resources essential to our survival.</blockquote>
Note that unlike Clippy, Satan hates <i>you</i>, personally, in just the way described by C.S. Lewis in <i>Perelandra</i>:<br />
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What chilled and almost cowed him most was the union of malice with something nearly childish. For temptation, for blasphemy, for a whole battery of horrors, he was in some sort prepared; but hardly for this petty, indefatigable nagging as of a nasty little boy at a preparatory school. Indeed no imagined horror could have surpassed the sense which grew within him as the slow hours passed, that this creature was, by all human standards, inside out - its heart on the surface and its shallowness at the heart. On the surface, great designs and an antagonism to Heaven which involved the fate of worlds: but deep within, when every veil had been pierced, was there, after all, nothing but a black puerility, an aimless empty spitefulness content to sate itself with the tiniest cruelties, as love does not disdain the smallest kindness.</blockquote>
But the profit-maximizing corporation, like Clippy the paperclip maximizing A.I., is merely indifferent to you: as the Less Wrong wiki's article on Clippy quotes Less Wrong's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maharishi_Mahesh_Yogi">maharishi</a>, <a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky">Eliezer Yudkowsky</a>,<br />
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<i>The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else.</i></blockquote>
A.I. is <a href="http://edge.org/conversation/jaron_lanier-the-myth-of-ai">not</a> a proximate danger. But we live under the beige dictatorship of corporate capital right now. And like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_God_that_Failed">Stalinism before it</a>, <a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/jameson.htm">late capitalist</a> corporate hegemony is an idolatrous perversion of economic justice, a "<a href="http://people.ucsc.edu/~nuclear/econ1/hotnews/godthatsucked.htm">god that sucked</a>." So it matters if corporate capital is Clippy. And it <i>is </i>Clippy: <a href="http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2012/05/case-law-on-the-fiduciary-duty-of-directors-to-maximize-the-wealth-of-corporate-shareholders.html">the fiduciary duty of corporate directors under modern law is to maximize profits, period</a>. Just as Clippy would mindlessly convert the whole planet into paperclips, indifferent to the consequences, so the corporation is <i>legally mandated</i> to mindlessly convert the whole planet into profits, indifferent to the consequences.<br />
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Does getting kids addicted to junk food maximize value for agri-business and food manufacturing shareholders? Then do it.<br />
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Does getting teens addicted to porn and to semi-pornographic popular entertainments maximize profits? <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBbGmkMGyok">Do it</a>.<br />
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Do strip mining, tar sands oil, Dickensian sweatshops, conflict diamonds, cocoa grown and shrimp caught by slaves boost profits? <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Do_It">Just do it.</a></i><br />
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Like <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/">structural racism</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent">media</a> <a href="http://www.getreligion.org/">bias</a>, our corporate-corrupted economy, culture, and politics are not a single, conscious human enemy. Like Clippy, global capitalism is a mindless algorithm, indifferent rather than malevolent. But the Prince of this World is the puppet-master of all such structures of oppression, and he is malevolence itself.<br />
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So resist the "alien invaders." Resist the Enemy. Follow the King.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-37661137063745283062015-05-31T00:00:00.000-05:002015-05-31T00:00:04.307-05:00Jesus approachesToday's Gospel (Mt. 28:16-20) for Trinity Sunday reads:<br />
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<i>The eleven disciples went to Galilee,<br />to the mountain to which Jesus had ordered them.<br />When they all saw him, they worshiped, but they doubted.<br />Then Jesus approached and said to them,<br />"All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me.<br />Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations,<br />baptizing them in the name of the Father,<br />and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,<br />teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.<br />And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age."</i></blockquote>
The Trinity is an unfathomable mystery. Much has been written of Our Triune God's unity in trinity. Today I'd like to focus on a humbler mystery, more suited to my station. Our Lord tells us today that He is with us "always, until the end of the age." But we don't always feel that He is, do we? Well, it says of the disciples here that<br />
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<i>they worshipped,<br />but they doubted.<br />Then Jesus approached....</i></blockquote>
Consider that. Although they doubted, they worshipped anyway. And Jesus approached.<br />
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In his <i>Pensées</i>, in the section on "the means of belief," Pascal warns of<br />
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Two extremes: to exclude reason, to admit reason only.</blockquote>
Reason only is insufficient:<br />
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<span style="text-align: justify;">The reason acts slowly, with so many examinations, and on so many principles, which must be always present, that at every hour it falls asleep, or wanders, through want of having all its principles present. Feeling does not act thus; it acts in a moment, and is always ready to act. We must then put our faith in feeling; otherwise it will be always vacillating.</span></blockquote>
Indeed, Pascal admonishes us that<br />
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<span style="text-align: justify;">It is superstition to put one's hope in formalities; but it is pride to be unwilling to submit to them.</span></blockquote>
<span style="text-align: justify;">Why? Because</span><br />
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<span style="text-align: justify;">The external must be joined to the internal to obtain anything from God, that is to say, we must kneel, pray with the lips, etc., in order that proud man, who would not submit himself to God, may be now subject to the creature.</span></blockquote>
<span style="text-align: justify;">By contrast,</span><br />
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<span style="text-align: justify;">Other religions, as the pagan, are more popular, for they consist in externals. But they are not for educated people. A purely intellectual religion would be more suited to the learned, but it would be of no use to the common people. The Christian religion alone is adapted to all, being composed of externals and internals. It raises the common people to the internal, and humbles the proud to the external; it is not perfect without the two, for the people must understand the spirit of the letter, and the learned must submit their spirit to the letter.</span></blockquote>
<span style="text-align: justify;">And that is the secret of how the doubting worshipper makes straight a path for Jesus to approach:</span><br />
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<span style="text-align: justify;">For we must not misunderstand ourselves; we are as much automatic as intellectual; and hence it comes that the instrument by which conviction is attained is not demonstrated alone. How few things are demonstrated? Proofs only convince the mind. Custom is the source of our strongest and most believed proofs. It bends the automaton, which persuades the mind without its thinking about the matter. Who has demonstrated that there will be a to-morrow, and that we shall die? And what is more believed? It is, then, custom which persuades us of it; it is</span><span class="pagenum" style="font-size: smaller; left: 1750.75px; position: absolute; text-align: right;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" id="Page_74" name="Page_74">[Pg 74]</a></span><span style="text-align: justify;"> custom that makes so many men Christians; custom that makes them Turks, heathens, artisans, soldiers, etc. (Faith in baptism is more received among Christians than among Turks.) Finally, we must have recourse to it when once the mind has seen where the truth is, in order to quench our thirst, and steep ourselves in that belief, which escapes us at every hour; for always to have proofs ready is too much trouble. We must get an easier belief, which is that of custom, which, without violence, without art, without argument, makes us believe things, and inclines all our powers to this belief, so that out soul falls naturally into it. It is not enough to believe only by force of conviction, when the automaton is inclined to believe the contrary. Both our parts must be made to believe, the mind by reasons which it is sufficient to have seen once in a lifetime, and the automaton by custom, and by not allowing it to incline to the contrary. </span><i style="text-align: justify;">Inclina cor meum, Deus.</i></blockquote>
You cannot reason your way to faith. That is not because the Faith is false, but because you are blind.<br />
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In his discussion (<a href="http://home.newadvent.org/summa/3153.htm#article5"><i>ST</i>, IIa-IIae, Q.153, art. 5</a>) of the "daughters of lust," Aquinas instructs us that<br />
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When the lower powers are strongly moved towards their objects, the result is that the higher powers are hindered and disordered in their acts. Now the effect of the vice of lust is that the lower appetite, namely the concupiscible, is most vehemently intent on its object, to wit, the object of pleasure, on account of the vehemence of the pleasure. Consequently the higher powers, namely the reason and the will, are most grievously disordered by lust. </blockquote>
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Now the reason has four acts in matters of action. First there is simple understanding, which apprehends some end as good, and this act is hindered by lust, according to Daniel 13:56, "Beauty hath deceived thee, and lust hath perverted thy heart." On this respect we have "blindness of mind." The second act is counsel about what is to be done for the sake of the end: and this is also hindered by the concupiscence of lust. Hence Terence says (Eunuch., act 1, sc. 1), speaking of lecherous love: "This thing admits of neither counsel nor moderation, thou canst not control it by counseling." On this respect there is "rashness," which denotes absence of counsel, as stated above (Question 53, Article 3). The third act is judgment about the things to be done, and this again is hindered by lust. For it is said of the lustful old men (Daniel 13:9): "They perverted their own mind . . . that they might not . . . remember just judgments." On this respect there is "thoughtlessness." The fourth act is the reason's command about the thing to be done, and this also is impeded by lust, in so far as through being carried away by concupiscence, a man is hindered from doing what his reason ordered to be done. [To this "inconstancy" must be referred.] [The sentence in brackets is omitted in the Leonine edition.] Hence Terence says (Eunuch., act 1, sc. 1) of a man who declared that he would leave his mistress: "One little false tear will undo those words." </blockquote>
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On the part of the will there results a twofold inordinate act. One is the desire for the end, to which we refer "self-love," which regards the pleasure which a man desires inordinately, while on the other hand there is "hatred of God," by reason of His forbidding the desired pleasure. The other act is the desire for the things directed to the end. With regard to this there is "love of this world," whose pleasures a man desires to enjoy, while on the other hand there is "despair of a future world," because through being held back by carnal pleasures he cares not to obtain spiritual pleasures, since they are distasteful to him.</blockquote>
It might be objected, Aquinas anticipates<br />
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that the daughters of lust are unfittingly reckoned to be "blindness of mind, thoughtlessness, inconstancy, rashness, self-love, hatred of God, love of this world and abhorrence or despair of a future world." For mental blindness, thoughtlessness and rashness pertain to imprudence, which is to be found in every sin, even as prudence is in every virtue. Therefore they should not be reckoned especially as daughters of lust.</blockquote>
but Aquinas replies that<br />
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According to the Philosopher (Ethic. vi, 5), intemperance is the chief corruptive of prudence: wherefore the vices opposed to prudence arise chiefly from lust, which is the principal species of intemperance.</blockquote>
Now, perhaps lust is not your besetting sin. Excellent. Nevertheless, unless Our Lord or His Mother is reading my blog now, you, dear reader, are a sinner. And sin, via the body, via the will, darkens the intellect.<br />
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What worship does, via the body, via the will, is create in you a docile heart, by which Christ, Our Liberator, may enlighten the intellect. You cannot completely reason your way to the Faith, because without the grace of Faith, your mind remains in darkness. The <a href="http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/01/point-of-contact.html">preambles of faith</a> can lead you--and should lead you--to the precipice. But then you must leap.<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-967841912296917632015-05-29T11:54:00.000-05:002015-05-29T15:34:11.282-05:00The Smoke of Satan<div class="tr_bq">
<i>(Note: This is a post about libertarianism, which is a very bad ideology. It does not contend that all libertarians are necessarily bad people. When not mistakenly advocating for wicked policies, many of them are lovely people personally.)</i><br />
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Via <i><a href="http://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/05/27/peak-left-and-the-valley-ahead/">Via Meadia</a></i>, we learn from <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/183386/social-ideology-left-catches-right.aspx">Gallup</a> that </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Thirty-one percent of Americans describe their views on social issues as generally liberal, matching the percentage who identify as social conservatives for the first time in Gallup records dating back to 1999.... In contrast to the way Americans describe their views on social issues, they still by a wide margin, 39% to 19%, describe their views on economic issues as conservative rather than liberal. However, as on social ideology, the gap between conservatives and liberals has been shrinking and is lower today than at any point since 1999, with the 39% saying they are economically conservative the lowest to date.</blockquote>
Social liberalism is ascendant, but <i>laissez-faire</i> economic ideology is still more than holding its own for the moment. We are living in a "liberaltarian" era. Mercifully, this too shall pass: perhaps a view of economics that grants a role for state aid to the poor will continue rising, or there will be a backlash against the squalor of today's porn-addled Sodom. But this Liberaltarian Era is our political moment, the <a href="http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/02/political-failure-modes-and-th.html">beige dictatorship</a> of our new <a href="http://www.firstthings.com/article/2015/06/the-power-elite">power elite</a>, and we must make sense of it if we are to be of any use in the public square right now. So let's take a look at this rough beast slouching toward us.<br />
<br />
When Brink Lindsey coined the term "liberaltarian" back in 2006, he <a href="http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/liberaltarians">wrote</a> of the attractions of such a project that<br />
<blockquote>
it has become increasingly clear that capitalism’s relentless dynamism and wealth-creation—the institutional safeguarding of which lies at the heart of libertarian concerns—have been pushing U.S. society in a decidedly progressive direction. The civil rights movement was made possible by the mechanization of agriculture, which pushed blacks off the farm and out of the South with immense consequences. Likewise, feminism was encouraged by the mechanization of housework. Greater sexual openness, as well as heightened interest in the natural environment, are among the luxury goods that mass affluence has purchased. So, too, are secularization and the general decline in reverence for authority, as rising education levels (prompted by the economy’s growing demand for knowledge workers) have promoted increasing independence of mind.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
Yet progressives remain stubbornly resistant to embracing capitalism, their great natural ally. In particular, they are unable to make their peace with the more competitive, more entrepreneurial, more globalized U.S. economy that emerged out of the stagflationary mess of the 1970s. Knee-jerk antipathy to markets and the creative destruction they bring continues to be widespread, and bitter denunciations of the unfairness of the system, mixed with nostalgia for the good old days of the Big Government/Big Labor/Big Business triumvirate, too often substitute for clear thinking about realistic policy options. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Hence today’s reactionary politics. Here, in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the rival ideologies of left and right are both pining for the ’50s. The only difference is that liberals want to work there, while conservatives want to go home there. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Can a new, progressive fusionism break out of the current rut? Liberals and libertarians already share considerable common ground, if they could just see past their differences to recognize it. Both generally support a more open immigration policy. Both reject the religious right’s homophobia and blastocystophilia. Both are open to rethinking the country’s draconian drug policies. Both seek to protect the United States from terrorism without gratuitous encroachments on civil liberties or extensions of executive power. And underlying all these policy positions is a shared philosophical commitment to individual autonomy as a core political value.</blockquote>
This ideology is really just libertarianism <i>simpliciter</i>, with Lindsey's coinage serving only to emphasize the tactical benefits to libertarians of moving from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Meyer_(political_philosopher)">Meyer</a>-style <a href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2007/01/the-conservative-consensus-frank-meyer-barry-goldwater-and-the-politics-of-fusionism">fusionism </a>with the G.O.P. to alliance with the Democrats, and to indicate <a href="http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/">a laudable willingness to countenance some kind of safety net for the poor</a>, which latter deserves its own post here sometime. I borrow the term because it highlights the growing edge of libertarian ideology in our time, which is sexually libertine and smugly secularist--indeed, <i>laïque </i>and anticlerical.<br />
<br />
<i>Contra</i> Lindsey, I yearn for <i>both</i> the traditional families and the vigorous union-driven broad prosperity of the 1950's. I'm a voice in the desert of today's surreal Sodom against onanism and sodomy, and I am an unabashed "blastocystophile," (as Lindsey puts it) who loathes Moloch as much as Ishtar. Indeed, I increasingly think <i>molochism</i> ought to be my new word for the murder of the unborn, to match sodomy and onanism: you coin your words Brink, I'll coin mine.<br />
<br />
So just what is a Catholic who strives for orthodox submission to the authority of the Magisterium on both "life" and "social justice" issues to make of this liberaltarian libertarianism? Consider that troll-sown kudzu of the comboxes, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nolan_Chart">Nolan Chart</a>:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<u><strike><img src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Political-spectrum-multiaxis.png" /></strike></u></div>
<br />
<br />
Now, the economic and cultural individualist is of course the libertarian, seeking to enable corporate rapine and cultural poison. And the seamless garment Catholic--that is to say, the orthodox Catholic, submissive to the Magisterium--works pursuant to the Gospel of Life for a cultural focus on community (traditional family open to life, flourishing parish, political subsidiarity and a patriotism of the local, a MacIntyrean <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/talking-benedict-option/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=talking-benedict-option">Benedict Option</a> in which to learn and incarnate virtue, etc.) and pursuant to the Gospel call to social justice, for an economic focus on community (universal destination of goods, preferential option for the poor, solidarity, distributism, unionism, guilds, co-ops, "small is beautiful," care for the "least of these," etc.).<br />
<br />
The Nolan Chart is plain enough: the libertarian takes a stand that is the polar opposite of the doctrine of Christ and His Church. The version of the Nolan Chart I've pasted above is kind enough to call Christ's will for us "communitarian." Other variants, more popular among libertarians I've encountered online, dub the pole of the Chart where the Cross is planted to be "populist," or "statist," or worse, "authoritarian" or "fascist."<br />
<br />
That the libertarian runs all of these disparate movements together both with each other and with the teaching of Christ and His Church shows a typically libertarian shallowness of mind, a kind of autistic flattening of perception which one encounters ubiquitously among both libertarians and among eliminative materialists, who indeed are often the same people, given how attractive a package the two diabolical doctrines are to such deformed minds as are so prominent in our culture that autistically worships mere technological toys like a phallic cult of propeller-headed rocket-science. <br />
<br />
The metaphysical underpinnings of liberaltarian diabolism are precisely what you would expect, given the <a href="http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/05/rosenberg-roundup.html">diabolical</a> <a href="http://www.alabamapolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/API-Research-Weaver-Ideas-Have-Consequences.pdf">consequences</a> of <a href="http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/03/razor-boy.html">nominalism</a>. Liberaltarian blogger Will Wilkinson has decreed, with the smug glibness typical of his jejune <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake">coterie</a>, and indeed of many of his <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/fashion/27YOUNGPUNDITS.html">coddled peers</a> in the <a href="http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/lasch.html">new clerisy</a> that <a href="http://www.willwilkinson.net/philosophy/2007/01/02/metaphysics-is-boring-when-you-know-the-answers/">Metaphysics is Boring When You Know the Answers</a>, the answers of course being Quinean scientism, nominalism, and other sorts of answers that are both the polar opposite of the wisdom of the Church. Of course, Wilkinson's precisely wrong, pernicious and faddish philosophical preferences are perfect for our moment: they are the sort of thing that the Quine and Parfit and Rorty reading likes of <i>bien pensants</i> like juicebox mafioso Matt Yglesias are sure to nod with approval at when Wilkinson hits a Beltway cocktail party, right before Yglesias makes the autistically economistic observation that churches should lose their tax exemption because "<a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/08/22/churches_should_be_taxed_then_everyone_can_speak.html">there's no reason to believe that religion-related expenditures enhance productivity</a>" which is exactly the sort of <a href="http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2013/06/what-is-derp-answer-is-technical.html">derp</a>, as these cool kids say, that centuries of nominalist materialism has made respectable, and so perfectly encapsulate our very autistic, very liberaltarian moment <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_activities_of_the_Koch_brothers">funded by</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg">techbro</a> <a href="http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/extropians.html">extropian</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel">John Galts</a>.<br />
<br />
But the "glibertarian" is at least frank: Christ is his enemy, these odd worshippers of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suetonius_on_Christians">Chrestus</a> a mere populist rabble of authoritarian elitists, effete pacifist communitarian hobbits, all warlike fascist orcs, an unsettling, disrespectable (even <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/catholicism-a-trashy-religion/">trashy</a>) <a href="https://peacerequiresanarchy.wordpress.com/2012/09/21/the-letters-of-jrr-tolkien/">anarcho-monarchist</a> chimera, led by a <a href="http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/thomas_becket.htm">troublesome priest</a> of Melchizedek of whom some <a href="https://preacherwin.wordpress.com/tag/nominalism/">enterprising proconsul, preferably a nice, sensible nominalist</a>, ought to rid the American Empire. The only thing that's clear from this mush-minded muddle of pejoratives is that the libertarian (and thus the "liberaltarian") knows the Church for what it is: his foe.<br />
<br />
Given the pejoratives ("fascist," etc.) flung at us from the Nolan Chart-brandishing side, I shall not shy away from naming the libertarian position for what it is: the pole opposite the Cross, and so by its own definition the position of the Enemy, of Satan. (The satanist has been a Nazi and a Nero and lots of other things over the centuries, but I write of the present moment.) Libertarianism's frankly satanic position is precisely, literally-as-to-etymology <i>diabolical</i>, in the sense Rod Dreher recently highlighted in a deeply thoughtful and richly rewarding <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-dis-integrating-of-reality/">post </a>on the <i>symbol/diabol</i> distinction:<br />
<blockquote>
Rieff’s prophetic point is that Western culture has renounced renunciation, has cast off the ascetic spirit, and therefore has deconverted from Christianity whether it knows it or not. In bringing this up with my priest friend, I asked him why he thought sex was at the center of the Christian symbolic that has not held.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
“It goes back to Genesis 1,” he said. “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Then he told them to ‘be fruitful and multiply.’ We see right there in the beginning the revelation that male and female, that complementarity, symbolizes the Holy Trinity, and in their fertility they carry out the life of the Trinity.”</blockquote>
<blockquote>
In other words, from the perspective of the Hebrew Bible, gender complementarity and fertility are built into the nature of ultimate reality, which is God. Our role as human beings is to strive to harmonize our own lives with that reality, because in so doing we dwell in harmony with God.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
“Do you know what the word ‘<i>symbol</i>’ means in the original Greek?” he asked. I said I did not. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
“It means ‘to bring together,’” he said.<br />
“To integrate,” I replied.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
“Yes. Now, do you know what the antonym for <i>symbol </i>is </blockquote>
<blockquote>
“No.” </blockquote>
<blockquote>
“It is <i>diabolos</i>, which means to tear apart, to separate, to throw something through another thing.” </blockquote>
<blockquote>
“So when something is diabolic, it means it is a disintegrating force?” </blockquote>
<blockquote>
“You could say that, yes,” he said. “All the time I’m dealing with the fallout from divorce and families breaking up. Kids who don’t know their fathers. You should hear these confessions. It’s a huge deal. You can see the loss of the sense of what family is for, and why it’s important.”</blockquote>
<blockquote>
He said that the students he works with are so confused, needy, and broken. Many of them have never seen what a functional, healthy family looks like, and have grown up in a culture that devalues the fundamental moral, metaphysical, and spiritual principles that make stable and healthy family formation possible — especially the belief that the generative powers of sex, within male-female complementarity, is intimately related to the divine nature, and the ongoing life of the Trinity. Nobody has ever explained it to them, he says. If they’ve heard anything from the Church, it’s something like, “Don’t do this because the Bible says not to” — which is not enough in this time and place. And many of them have never, or have rarely, seen it modeled for them by the adults in their lives.</blockquote>
<blockquote>
The Judith Butler essay brought that conversation to mind this morning, and reflection on the symbol/diabol distinction sent me online looking for more. Lo, the Google results give me this entry from a dating website, in which the author quotes from a bestselling 2004 book <i>The Art of Seduction</i>, by Robert Greene. From the website:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
In the book, Greene talks about the importance of language in seducing someone. Seduction, as you know, is a matter of how and what you communicate to your target, and is thus, extremely important in your interactions.</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Greene makes the distinction between two types of languages – <i>symbolic </i>and <i>diabolic </i>language. To quote him here:</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>“Most people employ symbolic language—their words stand for something real, the feelings, ideas, and beliefs they really have. Or they stand for concrete things in the real world. (The origin of the word “symbolic” lies in a Greek word meaning “to bring things together”—in this case, a word and something real.)</i></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>“As a seducer you are using the opposite: diabolic language. Your words do not stand for anything real; their sound, and the feelings they evoke, are more important than what they are supposed to stand for. (The word “diabolic” ultimately means to separate, to throw things apart—here, words and reality.) The more you make people focus on your sweet-sounding language, and on the illusions and fantasies it conjures, the more you diminish their contact with reality. You lead them into the clouds, where it is hard to distinguish truth from untruth, real from unreal.” </i></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
As an indirect seducer, you must focus on using diabolic rather than symbolic language. Your goal is to stimulate your target’s imagination, enveloping her into your spirit. Do this, and she will not be able to resist you.</blockquote>
There you have it. If nothing is real, then there is nothing but lies — that is to say, the manipulation of reality — and the pursuit of power. A worldview that believes in nothing real, only the will to power (expressed, for example, in deciding that your gender is what you say it is, and nothing more), is <b>intrinsically diabolical</b>. It scatters, it disintegrates, and makes the song of the world into senseless cacaphony....</blockquote>
<blockquote>
This civilizational madness will have to run its course. We now have our leading scholars saying that women can have penises — and this is considered the highest wisdom. It is on the basis of this wisdom that our laws are being changed. It is diabolical, in the sense of being fundamentally about dis-integration. Depending on your point of view, it is diabolical in every sense of the word. You hear in Judith Butler the voice of the Seducer, the voice of the Diabolist. Hers is no longer a marginal voice, but rather one increasingly magnified by our mainstream media....</blockquote>
<blockquote>
The denial of Logos as an ordering principle, and asceticism as an ordering function, is leading to the disintegration of all things, including the family, and ultimately the human personality. The world accepts this. Even many in the church accepts this. If you are going to be part of the resistance, and one day far into the future, when the lies fail, a renaissance — then you had better make provision for surviving and thriving in the long defeat.</blockquote>
Now, Judith Butler (a dangerously radically nominalist "queer theorist" but also a person of the Left) is no libertarian. But the precisely "diabolical" seduction strategy of Robert Greene, the quoted venereal Screwtape in Rod's post, is the seductive siren's call of the Market, of Mammon, of Venus, of the Nolan Chart's disintegrative, anomie-promoting "individualism," of oily men photographing gape-mouthed, wide-eyed girls to glance come-hither at the camera to sell you poisonous junk food and corpulent gas-gluttonous giant trucks, of Don Draper and Ayn Rand, of P.T. Barnum and Larry Flynt, of the voice that <i>Rage Against the Machine</i> warned me long ago is always there tempting the fighter for justice, seductively whispering:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>come and play,</i><br />
<i>come and play, </i><br />
<i>forget about the Movement.</i></blockquote>
Well, Christian, the Church is the Movement Christ founded. Don't let the whispering Serpent seduce you from your pilgrim's progess, and don't let his sirens tempt you to desert Christ the King and go over to the Enemy.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/272885-beware-that-when-fighting-monsters-you-yourself-do-not-become">Now we've stared into the abyss--let's not linger</a>. Soon, I hope to post on the political tactics of <a href="http://www.anvari.org/fortune/Miscellaneous_Collections/49545_christ-an-anarchist-who-succeeded-thats-all-andre-malraux.html">cultural and economic guerrilla resistance</a> that any Benedict Option will need for a successful <a href="http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/nietzsches-genealogy-morality-how-does-slave-422132">subversion</a> of the empire of this Beast.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-37430371502782847662015-05-28T11:44:00.000-05:002015-05-28T13:59:20.882-05:00The Single LifeOver at <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/for-the-synod-der-fix-ist-possibly-in/">Rod Dreher’s</a>, commenter <a href="https://turmarion.wordpress.com/">Turmarion</a> <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/for-the-synod-der-fix-ist-possibly-in/comment-page-3/#comment-7457889/">asks</a> social conservatives what the heck our endgame is with regard to the optimal societal status of same-sex attracted people:
<blockquote>I tried on another blog once to get some socons to come right out and say what they thought the ideal status would be</blockquote>
Here's my attempt as a "socon" to answer his question (with further quotes from his comment indented as blockquotes):
<br><br>
Turmarion, yours is really a question that same-sex attracted orthodox, traditionalist Christians need to lead the way on, I think. The Church has affirmed vocations like, e.g., monasticism, but the contours of monasticism were created and discovered by the pioneering monks of the Egyptian desert and their imitators elsewhere, not just invented by abstract a priori noodling about it. I imagine that whatever functional, flourishing lives same-sex attracted orthodox, traditionalist Christians are able to build will be models for sainthood that they have to discover, not that us straights will get to impose on them after reading some Thomist manual or something. (Not that I dislike Thomist manuals, which get a bad rap.)
<blockquote>Should gays go back in the closet?</blockquote>
Absolutely not. Same-sex attraction appears to be at least partly innate, and same-sex attracted people can’t build really deep supportive relationships with friends and family if they’re hiding something like that. OTOH, chaste gays might be prudent to be careful how they partipate in gay cultural events, just as the rest of us need to exercise prudence in similar situations. Here’s what I mean by that: there ought to be no shame or stigma attached to being same-sex attracted, any more than to being straight. But just as straights shouldn’t have an “Adultery Pride Parade,” orthodox traditionalists need to be sure that when we, say, march alongside the pride float at a St. Patrick’s Day parade, or attend a gay friend’s Unitarian wedding, or some such, that we are seen to be affirming the dignity of homosexual persons, or the depths of our friendship for the wedded gay friend, or what have you, rather than the acceptability of homosexual acts. I expect people like Eve Tushnet to be great examples in how to navigate this stuff going forward.
<blockquote>Should they have domestic partnerships?</blockquote>
IMHO it would take nigh-superhuman chastity not to have that turn into a near occasion of sin, so I think it would be extremely imprudent (just as I think Gandhi’s notorious habit, IIRC, of sleeping naked beside naked girls to hone his chastity was not only exploitive of the girls but evinced hubris regarding his own virtue). But such arrangements are an example of something that chaste trad gays are going to have to lead the way on; it’s not my place to pronounce on anything other than my own hunch of how it would go. That said, I think Tushnet’s desire to restore “vowed friendship” to cultural prominence is salutary in the extreme, and not just for gay people. Something like adelphopoiesis, on Tushnet’s rather than Boswell’s understanding, would be a tonic against the loss of homosocial friendship that not only marginalizes chaste gays, but also impoverishes so many straights (especially straight men) of the simple, vital pleasures of deep homosocial friendship once common to folks like, say, the Inklings. This is an important example, IMHO, of a gift that same-sex attracted people like Tushnet can provide for the whole Church, by leading the charge on issues like this.
<blockquote>What place do gays have in your view of how society ought to be?</blockquote>
Society ought to cherish each and every child of God.
<blockquote> There’s a big debate on this in celibate gay circles. Eve, Wesley Hill, and others argue for a positive view in which being gay is a part of one’s identity that can be a blessing, and in which sexuality is not denied. Rather, it is sublimated into the community and into friendship. She has also advocated for the revival of vowed friendships, as a way for gay people to have a lifelong but chaste bond with another.
On the other hand, some like Daniel Mattson strongly oppose this, insisting on using “homosexual” instead of “gay”, opposing a view of their orientation as even minimally positive, and insisting that the grace comes through resisting the urges of their damaged nature.
</blockquote>
Well, the Magisterium has called same-sex attraction “disordered,” and on a natural law understanding that’s inescapable. But one can celebrate the unique, vibrant contributions of, say, deaf people, autistic people, people with Downs, etc., as “blessings” (which in that sense they very much are) without also engaging in any Orwellian obfuscation of the plain fact that such conditions are departures from normative human nature. Likewise, I share Mattson’s wariness that affirmation of the ways in which the unique emotional, artistic, etc., gifts of same-sex attracted individuals are treasures for all of us, and thus rightly thought of as blessings, can shade into a celebration of same-sex attraction as somehow “just as valid,” just as rightly ordered toward human flourishing, as heterosexuality.
<br><br>
In sum: one side of this debate tends to accuse the other of being “homophiles,” while non-traditionalist observers will tut-tut that traditionalists are homophobically “heteronormative.” My take is that Christian charity requires us to affirm the blessings each person brings with them, and yet Christian charity also requires us to upbraid the sinner and to speak up for the proper ecology (as Benedict XVI so fruitfully put it) of the human family. Thus, we need to find a way to be “heteronormative homophiles,” if that makes any sense, to celebrate and cherish and affirm the unique gifts (if not, perhaps, “charisms,” as a technical terminological theological matter) our same-sex attracted peers bring without ceasing also to celebrate, cherish, and affirm a heteronormative theology of sacramental marriage and of rightly ordered human sexuality.
<br><br>
All of this opens up on a much deeper point that I think you’ll appreciate, Turmarion: One of the accusations flung at Thomists like Ed Feser (whom I admire) by the likes of DB Hart (whom I also admire) is adherence to a kind of “two tier” system of nature and supernature, of natural human flourishing and super-added grace. As a (poorly versed, autodidactic) Thomist myself, I think this accusation ultimately unjust. But, but:
<br><br>
Christ Crucified teaches us that the sort of normative human flourishing delineated by Aristotle—in which a wise man contemplates the divine while securely ensconced in a life charmed with natural goods like rank, wealth, and progeny—is not the truest, deepest model of human flourishing. The Crucified was not “flourishing” by Aristotle’s lights, and yet He incarnates for us what God’s telos for humanity really is.
<br><br>
I take Aquinas to have integrated this rather Augustinian thought into his Aristotelianism. YMMV, and I think does, IIRC. That’s fine. But Aquinas’ opinion being what it may have been (which question I leave to historians), it is my own humble opinion that any Catholic natural lawyer has to integrate these things, at grave risk of embodying the caricature of the arid neo-Thomist manualist if he does not.
<br><br>
On the one hand, those of us who make our living in the City of Man, especially those of us called to the vocation of marriage, rightly aim at human flourishing in something like Aristotle’s sense. OTOH, all Christians are called to sainthood. Part of sainthood is taking up your Cross, whatever that might be. Taking up one’s Cross ought not to mean, say, breaking your own leg, or imitating Gandhi’s chastity-testing sleeping arrangements, or refusing to take your antibiotics, just so you can rack up merit (like some Calvinist caricature of a Catholic) for how well you deal with the pain you cause yourself.
<br><br>
But while we should seek human flourishing, we must also shoulder any Cross that comes as an obstacle in the way of that flourishing, whether it be same-sex attraction, infertility, disability, poverty, or whatever. Relatedly, some of us do not have a vocation to marriage, or a calling to a career in the City of Man, but are instead called to abandon that “natural,” Aristotelian sort of flourishing for the “supernatural” flourishing of renunciation of natural goods like marriage and
wealth in favor of full time consecration to the works of the City of God.
<br><br>
As Charles Taylor points out, our Protestant and secular heritage in the modern West makes it hard for us to accept a division between flourishing in a normative natural life and flourishing in a “supernatural” life of renunciation, as it seems to draw an invidious distinction between schlubbish laymen and spiritual athletes. Instead, the post-Hildebrandine reformist trend has been to insist on sanctifying ordinary life, and in the Protestant case, to denigrate renunciative vocations as hubristic counterfeits.
<br><br>
Now, I of course think we go wrong to condemn the ordained and consecrated vocations. But the reformist is right that valorization of renunciation can lead us to neglect the need to sanctify the ordinary life, and relatedly (but not identically) to a gnostic contempt for the real goods praised by the likes of Aristotle. The need for the theologian is to find a “Middle Way” between cynical scorn of sanctity and gnostic scorn of fleshly flourishing, just as Siddhartha is said to have found one between the hubristic “ascetic athleticism” of the mendicants and the enslavement to the satanic principalities and powers of Kama-Mara characteristic of the unawakened, or more relevantly, just as our paradigmatic God-man knew when He ought to fast in the desert, and when He ought to let Himself be taken for a wine-bibber. “Both/and” is as usual the Catholic answer. Taylor’s “Reform” tendency is right that we are all of us called to sainthood, but wrong to think that there cannot be different ways to incarnate that call.
<br><br>
All that said, the position of the same-sex attracted orthodox traditionalist Catholic, called, per the Magisterium, to a chaste “single life” is undefined and unexplored as yet (although the likes of Tushnet are bravely exploring that <i>terra incognita</i> for us, thanks be to God), and is liminal between the natural flourishing of heteronormative marriage (which rightly orders, by uniting, the unitive and procreative natural goods of human sexuality) and the Cross taken up by those with vocations to the ordained or consecrated life.
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Called to celibacy, the exclusively same-sex attracted Catholic called to the single life is in that regard a renunciant. But not a consecrated renunciant. Here, a riff on Tushnet may help: “vowed friendship,” “spiritual friendship,” etc., is not a “vocation” or a state of life or a sacrament in the way that marriage or ordination are. But it is a natural good, just as are many of the other life events (launching a ship, e.g.) that the Church has been happy to provide blessings for.
What distinguishes the friendship that might rightly be celebrated in a non-sacramental rite of adelphopoiesis from the sacrament of marriage is that while marriage unites the unitive and procreative natural goods of a couple, “friendship,” qua friendship is a strictly unitive good.
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In the sense that the chaste same-sex attracted Catholic is called to attain sainthood in part through taking up the renunciatory Cross of celibacy, there is something akin to consecrated life there. In the sense that natural flourishing through the unitive good of friendship can be an enriching, central part of the single life, there is something akin to the vocation to marriage there. The discernment in our time of the vocation to the single life is a quite new development in doctrine. I look forward to the ways that both the Tushnet/Hill and the Mattson perspectives from within that sector of the Church will craft new ways to follow the whole of Christ’s teaching without abandoning either our orthodoxy, or our humanity.
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-37961791733772987922015-04-29T11:01:00.000-05:002015-05-28T11:47:07.128-05:00The real world, and the real battleRod Dreher continues to inspire important discussions in the orthodox Christian community with his suggestion that the time is ripe for a <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/benedict-option/">"Benedict Option."</a> Today, Rod <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/should-we-fight-the-culture-war/">asks</a> readers what we think of critiques of the Benedict Option from those like Princeton Professor (and "New Natural Law" theorist) Robby George, who want to hold off on the Benedict Option and continue fighting, e.g., civil same-sex marriage (SSM), in the public square. Although a sacramental SSM is of course a non-starter for an orthodox Catholic like me, I think the larger question of whether cultural traditionalists should continue to follow the "Moral Majority" model of focusing our energies on politics is the right one is an important question. More precisely, I question if the Moral Majority model was <i>ever</i> the right one. Here is what I commented on Rod's <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/should-we-fight-the-culture-war/">post</a>.
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Robby George’s zeal and dedication are admirable (and he’s about the single most patient, affable, unaffected guy I can imagine, having once had the privilege of meeting him at a Christian Legal Society brown bag lunch) but I think the sacrifice he personally may be called to make is accepting that his prominence as a celebrated G.O.P. intellectual won’t survive much longer as the G.O.P. cynically walks away from the SSM issue so that it may better woo the pro-SSM cohorts that will be an ever-rising percentage of the electorate from 2016 onward. Happily, he has far more important work to do; as a selection from the Ken Myers talk about "seed ideas" quoted above says:
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The most important way we can be a counterculture serving the common good is not through influencing government policies but through re-forming the moral and metaphysical imaginations of our contemporaries.
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Precisely. Those seminal ideas are what rule the world, not political ephemera. St. Paul wielded far more lasting influence over the future than Nero. The Scholastic debates between realists and nominalists (as the post about Richard Weaver noted yesterday) did far more to lay the groundwork for the astonishing historical ruptures of modernity’s five centuries than the Hundred Years’ War. No one in a thousand years will care whether SSM became legal in the ancient American Empire because of a high court mandate or on a province-by-province basis. But today’s ideas, today’s discussions, today’s communities and culture, and most importantly, today’s prayers to the living God: those seeds will still be bearing fruit in a thousand years, in two thousand years.
In reality, the fate of each individual soul—which is eternal—is of far more consequence than the political trifles of a decade, a century, or a season. Our worldly cares tempt us to ignore this, this lay of the land in the real world. As Frank Sheed wrote in the dedication to his classic <i>Theology and Sanity</i>:
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Sanity, remember, does not mean living in the same world as everyone else; it means living in the real world. But some of the most important elements in the real world can be known only by the revelation of God, which it is theology’s business to study. Lacking this knowledge, the mind must live a half-blind life, trying to cope with a reality most of which it does not know is there. This is a wretched state for an immortal spirit, and pretty certain to lead to disaster. There is a good deal of disaster around at this moment.
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If we think that helping some politician get elected is more important than prayer, contemplation, and community, then we are not living in the real world, but only in secular society’s impoverished, imprisoning view of what is real and important—devoting our lives to bickering about shadows with the other manacled fools in Plato’s cave.
In his novel <i>Perelandra</i>, C.S. Lewis tried to evoke the reality in which we actually live, the water we fish don’t notice:
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He thought he saw the Great Dance. It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties. Each figure as he looked at it became the master-figure or focus of the whole spectacle, by means of which his eye disentangled all else and brought it into unity only to be itself entangled when he looked to what he had taken for mere marginal decorations and found that there also the same hegemony was claimed, and the claim made good, yet the former pattern not thereby dispossessed but finding in its new subordination a significance greater than that which it had abdicated. He could see also (but the word “seeing” is now plainly inadequate) wherever the ribbons or serpents of light intersected, <i>minute corpuscles of momentary brightness: and he knew somehow that these particles were the secular generalities of which history tells—peoples, institutions, climates of opinion, civilizations, arts, sciences, and the like—ephemeral coruscations that piped their short song and vanished.</i> The ribbons or cords themselves, in which millions of corpuscles lived and died, were things of some different kind. At first he could not say what. But he knew in the end that most of them were individual entities. If so, the time in which the Great Dance proceeds is very unlike time as we know it Some of the thinner and more delicate cords were beings that we call short-lived: flowers and insects, a fruit or a storm of rain, and once (he thought) a wave of the sea. Others were such things as we also think lasting: crystals, rivers, mountains, or even stars. <i>Far above these in girth and luminosity and flashing with colours from beyond our spectrum were the lines of the personal beings, yet as different from one another in splendour as all of them from the previous class. But not all the cords were individuals: some were universal truth or universal qualities. It did not surprise him then to find that these and the persons were both cords and both stood together as against the mere atoms of generality which lived and died in the clashing of their streams</i>: but afterwards, when he came back to earth, he wondered. And by now the thing must have passed together out of the region of sight as we understand it. For he says that the whole solid figure of these enamoured and inter-inanimated circlings was suddenly revealed as the mere superficies of a far vaster pattern in four dimensions, and that figure as the boundary of yet others in other worlds: till suddenly as the movement grew yet swifter, the inter-weaving yet more ecstatic, the relevance of all to all yet more intense, as dimension was added to dimension and that part of him which could reason and remember was dropped farther and farther behind that part of him which saw, even then, at the very zenith of complexity, complexity was eaten up and faded, as a thin white cloud fades into the hard blue burning of the sky, and a simplicity beyond all comprehension, ancient and young as spring, illimitable pellucid, drew him with cords of infinite desire into its own stillness. He went up into such a quietness, a privacy, and a freshness that at the very moment when he stood Farthest from our ordinary mode of being he had the sense of stripping off encumbrances and awaking from trance, and coming to himself.
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Angels and demons see this reality and its stakes for what they are. Elections and wars are but wet paper to them, fragile and ephemeral.
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But the eternal soul of the most humble, pathetic “loser” you can imagine? A fortress forested with alabaster spires; vast as Sahara; looming like Himalaya; battlements warded by Heaven’s hosts, but besieged by demon legions; a great strategic prize in the one, only really Great War that ever was or will be: a rich trove of gems, a palisaded garden, a dazzling, awful armory of prayers meekly offered and thus terrible, terrible in their power to shape the Great War. A high-walled treasure city: the celestial and infernal armies’ struggle for it—could we but see it—a saga far worthier sung than trifling Troy’s! That’s the soul of the raving bum on the corner; the addict trembling in the squalid crack den; the disabled, disfigured child in the womb; the gay activist calling you a bigot in all caps on Facebook. That soul is of infinite value.
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And so is your soul, and mine, and the soul of the young atheist you bring around to faith in Our Lord Jesus Christ by chatting about ideas in the coffee shop. That’s reality. Yes, this sublunary sphere matters: it is God’s good gift to us, which we are to cherish and steward, this globe both our garden and His Temple. But the really great common good is not most ably served by statesmanship, but by discipleship. Today’s hegemonic Rome may burn, and we will rightly mourn it as patriots who love our native earth. But we must not forget that it is not this Babylon, but the New Jerusalem, that is our country:
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<i>The Benedict Option is not a retreat: it is joining the battle in the real world.</i>
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Don’t retreat into the beguiling tribal squabbles of politics. Follow the King to battle.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-47366244711002815702015-04-27T19:00:00.000-05:002015-05-01T16:09:49.713-05:00Pedagogical Esotericism in the BibleOver at thoughtful, thought-provoking atheist blogger Scott Alexander's <a href="http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/26/ot19-dont-thread-on-me/">semimonthly open thread</a>, commenter Cauê asks for theist commenters' views of the Bible. This a lightly edited version of the second point I made in my reply:
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Esotericism is a huge deal in understanding ancient writing. Not esotericism of the “spooky occult secrets” sort, but pedagogical and belle-lettristic esotericism. I’ve been asked in Scott's comments before why, if God inspired the Bible, He didn’t clearly lay out what His plan was, and prove it was Him by dropping some modern science in there or something. The answer to the latter part is that He was working through autonomous human authors who didn’t know any modern science. The answer to the former is that ancient people never would’ve preserved a book that clearly laid out anything, because they scorned such books. They liked their books like we like our online RPGs: full of hidden Easter eggs. (Indeed, finding allegorical “Easter” eggs in the Old Testament was kind of the main hobby for Christian exegetes for centuries.)
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From P.E. Gobry’s recent “pedagogical esotericism”-stressing <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/inebriateme/2014/11/the-ancient-art-of-reading-and-biblical-interpretation/">review</a> of the recent Straussian work <i>Philosophy Between the Lines<i></i></i> by Arthur M. Melzer
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<blockquote>Philosophers did not just practice esotericism as a way of sneaking subversive ideas past the censors, but also as a pedagogical device, much in the way of Socrates’ insistent questioning. For the Ancient philosophers, philosophy was not just, perhaps not even primarily, a body of doctrine, but an attitude of the mind towards contemplation and relentless questioning. The task of making philosophers, then, was not primarily about imparting ideas, but about leading people towards a certain state of mind. The philosopher wanted his pupils to discover his ideas on their own, by studying the text and working hard to get past the literal meaning, and thereby growing into a philosophic mind and posture.
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In this regard, Melzer points out something else (in retrospect obvious, but which was quite an “Aha!” moment for me), which is the rarity of books in the era before the advent of the printing press, and the fact that the classical liberal arts curriculum included long study in “rhetoric” (i.e. the art of writing) which is something we have all-but forgotten. Everyone who was educated was trained in writing and reading between the lines. And because books were rare and expensive, owners of books, instead of the contemporary practice of reading a book once and then just moving on to the next, would typically reread the same book many times over their lifetime. Knowing this, authors would typically be alert to write in an esoteric style, concealing many layers of meaning into the text, so that the book would still be rewarding on the Nth reading. Just like, to the contrary, anyone writing a book today knows all-too-well that his book is competing with millions of other books, and so strives to make his argument as clear, literal and obvious as possible for fear that the reader just drop the book and move on to another.
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If this is how everyone understood the art of writing and the art of reading until very recently, then, certainly, this should have an impact on how we read the Bible. In fact, Strauss was first alerted to the reality of esoteric writing by his reading of Maimonides and Rashi, the two greatest Medieval rabbis. (Maimonides (like Aquinas) read Aristotle esoterically, as did every single Ancient commentator (Aristotle is the single author with the biggest secondary literature in the Ancient world), even though today Aristotle is considered as perhaps the most literal Ancient philosopher.)
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Even without referring to inspired spiritual senses, we should still realize that the Modern prejudice that the surface meaning of a text is almost always the most authentic is just that–a culturally-contingent prejudice. By contrast, educated readers and writers for the rest of history would have had precisely the opposite assumption: that it’s more likely that the surface meaning of the text is not the most authentic. And this is indeed how many rabbis and Church Fathers read the Bible.</blockquote>
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Anyway, that’s a lot. But as a Catholic, if there was ONE concept I wish contemporary atheists had in their head about the Bible, it would be how the modern secular, post-Protestant prejudice that a high quality book is necessarily a highly perspicuous book is 180 degrees from the stylistic canons of the Bible’s own era. Once I discovered the perspective of pedagogical esotericism, studying the Bible went for me from frustration at its ambiguity to delight in its intricacy. And I suddenly understood why the Church Fathers and the medieval Scholastics enjoyed commentating it so much, and why moderns tend to dislike it so much.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2145367389527980151.post-69032354166273823962015-04-23T11:00:00.000-05:002015-05-01T15:41:57.336-05:00Scrumping monkeysRod Dreher has a <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/making-a-monkey-of-the-law/comment-page-1/#comments">post</a> up about animal rights activists trying to bring a habeas corpus suit on behalf of lab chimps at SUNY. I commented:
<blockquote>Bioethics is and will be the new disputed frontier of the culture wars.
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Thus, this and similar suits in recent years are indeed ominous portents, although many here will doubtless wish to point out that they’re not succeeding…yet. The linked NY Times article indicates that the state judge involved sees this ruling as merely a way to get the parties into court, rather than as a ruling on the merits. So that’s good.
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Further, legal personhood is a fictional construct—chimps aren’t people, but neither are corporate entities like business corporations, churches, political parties, etc. So legal personhood need not imply metaphysical personhood of the sort rightly assigned to humans. So that’s another reason not to fret.
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However, there are still reasons to fret: Professor Tribe, in the linked article, says we’re not ready to grant “human personhood” to chimps “yet.” This is very dangerous rhetoric indeed. First, “human personhood,” real personhood, is the sort of personhood that thinkers of the ilk of Peter Singer and Julian Savelescu want society to grant to nonhuman animals (and maybe A.I. at some point), and withhold from the comatose, the unborn, and even infants under the age of two.
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Animal rights activists’ focus on “personhood” lawsuits like habeas corpus actions reveals (not that they’re shy about stating their goals) that revolutionizing our definition of human personhood to include animals (and incidentally to exclude disfavored humans) is the core agenda here. As Wesley J. Smith (whose National Review column “Human Exceptionalism” is really the go-to reference, IMHO, for traditionalist coverage of skirmishes like these at the bioethical frontiers of the culture war) often quotes PETA President Ingrid Newkirk assertion that typifies the extremist desire to blur our boundaries of personhood: “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.”
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Backed into a corner, many of these activists will protest that they only mean that “a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy” in the sense that all can feel pain and should have their welfare protected. But that is not the vision that animates the zealous core of the animal rights movement, as we can see in two key ways.
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First, we know that one-year-old babies can feel pain, but thinkers like Singer and Savelescu think it’s fine to murder them if they are disabled or otherwise inconvenience their parents. Now, presumably S&S (“the S.S.” was a deeply tempting choice of contraction given my read on the ultimate stakes here, but this debate gets heated enough without bringing Godwin’s Law into it, so I think I owe S&S’s side at least the minimal courtesy of refraining) would say that such children ought to be anaesthetized before being “euthanized.” However, PETA zealots want all animal experimentation to end—anaesthetized or not. So reducing animal pain is not the end goal here.
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Second, “animal rights” overlaps with, but is very different than, “animal welfare.” Animal cruelty laws already exist to address animal welfare concerns. If regulations on animal experimentation don’t sufficiently protect animals from needless pain, then animal advocates should (and can) advocate for state and federal lawmakers to strengthen those regulations.
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Now, perhaps the concern is that government regulators aren’t sufficiently motivated (or funded, or whatever) to bring actions against violators of existing animal welfare regs. But if that’s the case, then PETA and its ilk ought to be lobbying for qui tam provisions in animal welfare regs.
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(A “qui tam” provision allows private “whistleblower” suits in cases where the government is being defrauded (which isn’t relevant here) and also, relevantly, can allow private parties to bring suit against other private parties for violating laws or regulations. The classic law school example of such a qui tam suit would be a local nonprofit bringing suit under a qui tam provision against a local factory for dumping pollutants in a nearby river in violation of environmental regs.)
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Now, there is a complication here: SUNY is a state agency, and IIRC (although I am very much open to correction on this point, which is far outside my knowledge base) qui tam suits, at least under federal statutes, can’t be brought against states for 11th Amendment reasons. However, I would imagine that legislators in Albany could be lobbied (or, being Albany, bought, if one does politics that way) to add some sort of private enforcement provision to state regs.
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So, with the caveat that SUNY is a state agency, and maybe that’s relevant in the present case, I think it’s revealing that these zealots, across a variety of cases over the years, have sought a habeas corpus remedy rather than a qui tam remedy. A qui tam remedy would allow them to bring animal abusers to court. But it wouldn’t be a legal recognition of personhood for animals, any more than present qui tam suits against polluters of rivers represent personhood for rivers.
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So this isn’t about animal welfare: it’s about animal personhood.
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It’s an extremist position, and hasn’t gained much traction yet. But the two key ideological traits that allowed for SSM’s rapid ascent to cultural respectability in our Lockean legal order and our emotivist, therapeutic public culture are there:
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1. Sympathetic victims. SSM had the travails of decent people denied hospital visitation, child custody, and other basic civil protections for the family lives they had built. Animal rights has primates, cetaceans, and every big-eyed fuzzy critter you can think of.
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2. A carefully constructed narrative of itself as the next civil rights frontier. Richard Rorty wrote of secular relativist liberalism as a project of expanding circles of concern and compassion—from propertied able-bodied white men to women, people of color, disabled people, etc. As we’ve seen, SSM fit right into that vision, and transgender narratives do, too. Here, the idea of expanding the circle of concern to include animals is an ideologically natural (indeed, perhaps historically inevitable) outworking of Deweyan progressive visions like Rorty’s, and indeed animal rights thinkers like Singer, and the people at the Great Apes Project (a primate personhood initiative associated with a lot of these habeas suits in the U.S. and with campaigns for primate personhood parliamentary legislation in countries like Spain) have been articulating that exact “expanding circle of concern” case for animal rights as the next civil rights for years now.
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All movements start small. And this particular suit is unlikely to prevail. But these suits for the rights of beasts portend that something very, very rough indeed is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. This is tomorrow’s culture war. And the side that has sympathetic victims and a narrative of itself as “the new civil rights movement” always seems to win. The time to start thinking rigorously about how to counter this—or how to survive our very, very probable defeat in a future American cultural landscape where chimps are obviously people, comatose humans obviously aren’t, and anyone who thinks differently is a “religious nut”—is long past.</blockquote>
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I got some thoughtful pushback, to the effect that my view was alarmist, "mistaking a squirrel rustling a tree branch outside for the onrushing Wehrmacht." I replied:
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<blockquote>Oh, I don’t think that tree branch rustling outside in our garden is the Wehrmacht, those noisy brutes—we’d both have noticed their sort by now. I think it’s maybe the Wandervögel tramping through our yard, those apolitical German hippie hiker kids, happy to admit Jews and gay people into their ranks, eager for peace, love, nature, and vegetarianism, greeting each other with a hearty “Heil!”, singing German folk songs round the campfire, and dabbling in Teutonic neopaganism. Nice kids, wholesome ideals, happy to have them stroll through our yard. But I do notice that some of those ideas could, maybe, be appropriated a certain way, and do some damage. Not now, not in 1895, as the boys in our garden rustle the branches of our blooming spring trees so they can grab flowers for their belles’ hair. But in a few decades? In the far, futuristic world of 1933 or 1945, with its technologies we can hardly dream of from the vantage of 1895? I don’t know. Maybe. I’m far from panicked. But I think sober reflection is in order. And I think some of those Teutonic neopagan elements, in particular, ought to be opposed before they make trouble. I’m going to go talk to those kids on our lawn now, so we can reason together. No harm in that, and it might ward off something ugly. There will be apples on our trees soon enough, and they might yet scrump them. Fair enough—what could be more wholesome than a fresh-picked apple? And we’ve plenty to spare for scrumpers. But I do recall that mankind has gotten in trouble scrumping apples before; terrible trouble indeed, from messing about with something good-seeming, promising godlike knowledge and power, but proven in the eating a fruit full of worm-spoiled woe and sorrow. I’d best warn those nice kids away from the orchard. Now. Before the apples come.</blockquote>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0