by

Open Thread: the Sufficient Conditions of Justice

Skeggy Thorson points out that the monstrous Aztecs had patriarchy, monarchy, an aristocracy, an ancient, venerable and sophisticated state religion, a highly evolved patrimony of arts and crafts, and I suppose many other characteristics of a traditional society. The same could be said of the formidable and revolting Canaanites, Carthaginians, and Phoenicians.

More than that is needed for a just society, or a good society, and especially for a noble society.

What then, are the de minimis characteristics of a traditional society *that is also good* – and that, therefore, has a shot at nobility?

Continue reading →

by

The Incipient Orthodoxy of the Androsphere

I have been spending some time lately reading in the androsphere,[1] and based on what I have learned from scratching the surface of that huge and passionate discourse, I feel rather hopeful about the prospects of the men who participate therein. Most of them, to be sure, seem stuck for the time being in a slough of despond. They are cynical, skeptical, nihilistic. I will not go so far as to say that they are nihilist, as most of them still affirm the existence and value of manly virtues – some go so far as to affirm the value of womanly virtues. Mostly, though, they are angry, or bitter. But that’s no way to live, over the long run. So they won’t, I figure.

Continue reading →

by

Is Ideology Anti-Christian? (The Argument in Ibsen’s Emperor and Galilean)

Introduction. Paul Johnson, usually acute, prejudices the case against Henrik Ibsen (1828 – 1906) in the chapter that he devotes to the instigator of modern drama in his Intellectuals (1993), where the author of Emperor and Galilean (1873) keeps company with the likes of Karl Marx, Berthold Brecht, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemingway, and Lillian Hellman. Johnson can classify Ibsen under the pejorative label of an “intellectual” only by ignoring Ibsen’s text and concentrating on the biographical details, which indeed make their subject look like a contemptible piece of work. This criticism of Johnson by no means invalidates Johnson’s definition of an “intellectual.” On the contrary, Johnson has defined the “intellectual” brilliantly and his treatment of the phenomenon must bear instructively on any analysis of Ibsen’s play about Julian the Apostate. According to Johnson, the “intellectual,” who appears first in the person of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is a politically committed character for whom “a utopian, socialist future [is] plainly a substitute for a religious idealism in which he [cannot] believe.” An intellectual is often the master of a narrow slice of specialized knowledge who, however, feels “no incongruity in moving from [his] own discipline… to public affairs.” Yet when examined closely, even the specialized knowledge of the intellectual, his peculiar theory, tends to be unconvincing and perverse – a type of pleading by the person to himself to protect his theory from inconvenient facts and to preserve his vision of himself as someone qualified to “counsel humanity.” Writing specifically of Rousseau, Johnson remarks that intellectuals see themselves, not as “servants or interpreters of the gods but [as] substitutes” – that is, of both the gods or God and the sacerdotal clerisy. Johnson writes of that “most marked [of the] characteristics of the new secular intellectuals,” namely “the relish with which they subjected religion and its protagonists to critical scrutiny.”

Continue reading →

by

Why not a Catholic Society Instead of a Liberal Theocracy?

I claim that’s what Catholics should be going for in my most recent column at Catholic World Report. There’s some to-and-fro in the comments with Mark Brumley, the CEO of the outfit that publishes CWR, who seems to believe in American pluralism more than I do.

At bottom, I think the issue is that he starts his analysis with the current interpretation of Dignitatis Humanae, the Vatican II pronouncement on religious freedom, while I start mine with the normal relation between a political society and the goods those who take part in the society want to further and protect. If the influence of Catholicism on public life grew it seems the two would begin to point in different directions. As I suggest in the discussion, though, it seems to me the interpretation of DH would likely (and legitimately) shift in response to such a change. That’s the function of the expressions like “due limits” and “public morality” that are found in the document.

by

Environmentalist Pseudo-Religiosity

My longtime friend and correspondent Steve Kogan has an essay  at The Brussels Journal on the pseudo-religiosity and gnostic intolerance of the environmentalist movement.  In particular, Steve, who is a close-reader par excellence, skewers Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s Population Bomb (1968) and its face-saving sequel The Population Bomb Revisited (2009).  Steve’s is an exceptionally fine essay, the first of three parts.  I hope that aficionados of The Orthosphere will take the time to read it.

by

Righteousness & Peace

Walking from my office to the train the other day, I reflected on how wicked and dissolute I have been lately, relatively speaking. Not like a rake or a cheat, I hasten to add, but rather a choirboy; things like moments of sloth, violating my diet rules, staying up too late reading, want of charity toward others, dilatory prayers, stuff like that. Not that those are small things, at all; indeed, they loom very large for me. The reading thing is a real problem; I can’t seem to shake it.

Anyway, I was walking toward the train feeling rather willfully sinful; stiff-necked, and besotted with my worldly involvements. I was positively enjoying them. Mostly I was reeling from the moral challenges at work lately, which are calling for – and often not finding – a great deal of charity on my part. My dander was up: I was irritated, sore and a tad self-righteously angry. And sorry for myself; let’s not overlook that bit.

I reached into my pocket for no particular reason and encountered my little rosary. And so, reminded, I began to pray for people: Lawrence Auster, my friends and relatives who are in trouble, the tenor I once sang with who died in ‘84. The list goes on for about 50 lives these days. It’s really rather horrifying; it seems as though almost everyone I know is in some sort of serious difficulty or danger, however well the rest of their lives might be going. I suppose that goes without saying, and should not surprise me so much, and sadden me. But this habit of intercession as I walk has quickened my wit to the pervasive tragedy of life – to the agony sooner or later entailed by mere existence, much of which naturally ends up, so far as we can see, as a totally useless waste, nothing more than noise or heat attendant to the general and predominantly orderly flow of history; a cost of doing business here on Earth. It’s a sorrowful apprehension; but, also, beautiful.

Continue reading →

by

The Eye of Sauron

The Behemoth Prism program, under which the Federal NSA snoops on essentially all the phone calls and web activity of all Americans, is operated for the ostensible purpose of protecting us from Moslem terrorist plots developing on American soil. We do indeed need to counter the threat of terrorism within our borders. But there would be no such terrorism in the first place – or, at least, very little – if there were no Moslems in North America. What it amounts to, then, is that our governors are keeping track of everything Americans say electronically *so that* they can keep welcoming Moslems to this country with open arms – and keep alive the threat of Moslem terrorism. The program is needed so that the program can be kept needful.

Would the Prism program exist if there were no Moslems in North America, or therefore any Moslem terrorism? Of course. It’s just that in that case our overseers would be forced to trot out some other rationale for its existence; war with EastAsia, perhaps, rather than with NearEastAsia.

Continue reading →

by

The faith was built by tough men

Yesterday (in the Roman liturgical calendar) was the feast of St. Boniface, the Anglo-Saxon missionary who contributed greatly to the cause of converting what is today Germany. From The Lives of the Saints (emphasis mine):

 His first attempt to convert the pagans in Holland having failed, he went to Rome to obtain the Pope’s blessing on his mission, and returned with authority to preach to the German tribes. It was a slow and dangerous task; his own life was in constant peril, while his flock was often reduced to abject poverty by the wandering robber bands. Yet his courage never flagged. He began with Bavaria and Thuringia, next visited Friesland, then passed on to Hesse and Saxony, everywhere destroying the idol temples and raising churches on their site. He endeavored, as far as possible, to make every object of idolatry contribute in some way to the glory of God; on one occasion, having cut down on immense oak which was consecrated to Jupiter, he used the tree in building a church, which he dedicated to the Prince of the Apostles.

Such behavior might offend the syncretist neo-Pagans that populate the ruins of modern Christendom, but I, for one, take comfort in the story, and in the contradiction it offers to modern, feminized pseudo-Christianity. The faith was built by the labors of tough men, by fishers and farmers and carpenters, men with sunburned forearms and calloused hands and muscled backs, men with hammers and axes and nails clutched between their teeth. The love of Christ did not destroy their manliness, as our soft and doughy cultural elites insist it must; it perfected them as men.

St. Boniface, pray for us!

by

The Argument from Intension

Consider this moment of your existence. In this moment, you have certain feelings. Notice that all these feelings are of two sorts: either reactive, or proactive.

On the one hand, they are responses to aspects of the past – of moments previous to this one, whether arriving from your own past experiences or from other parts of the world. For example, you feel the sound of the bird singing outside the window, and you feel a jet of glee at the beauty of his song. I. e., you feel something you have inherited, not from one of your own past moments, but from the world exterior thereto, which has then been supplemented by your own evaluation of that feeling. At the same time, you feel a glow of satisfaction arriving at your present moment of life from the fact of your having taken a delicious, roborific swallow of coffee a moment ago, and you feel good about that feeling. You have feelings of your own past experiences, that are traces of your past feelings; and you have feelings about those past feelings, such as judgements or desires. E.g., the judgement that the coffee has had a good effect upon you, and that other such effects would be welcome.

So, you have feelings that you have inherited from the past of the world in general, and also feelings about that portion of the past of the world that is included in your own personal career through life; and you have feelings about those feelings from the two departments of the past, the you department and the not-you department.

On the other hand, you have feelings about the future. There are things you feel are lacking in the present moment, that you wish were present; and there are things you feel are present to you at this moment, which you wish could be absent. You might for example feel right now that it would be nice to be chewing a croissant; meantime, you might also be feeling that it would be nice if you didn’t feel so hungry. These feelings are not about things that are present to you now, or that were present to you a moment ago, but about things that have never yet been present to you: namely, the feeling of chewing right now, and the feeling of satiety right now. True, you had a croissant yesterday, and felt sated; but the croissant of yesterday is not the croissant of today, nor likewise is yesterday’s satiety any comfort to this morning’s hunger. It is not as though you could chew yesterday’s croissant again right now, or feel yesterday’s satiety. No; these feelings of desire are about the future.

You have all these feelings you’ve somehow inherited from the past, and then you have all these feelings about the future. So here’s the question: where is that past, and where that future?

Continue reading →

by

I Get a Kick out of Fugue

I have a new essay at Kidist Paulos Asrat’s Reclaiming Beauty website; the topic is the musical genre of fugue – its meaning and history through the mid-Nineteenth Century.  Incidentally, my semester kept me quite busy and it is only since final examinations (two weeks ago) that I have been able to write.  I hope to post an essay soon at The Orthosphere on Christianity and Ideology.