Author: James Kalb

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Remembrance of things past

I haven’t been active on my weblog in recent years, mostly using it for notices of pieces I’ve published elsewhere, but stubborn technical issues in an aging homemade Drupal installation finally forced migration to the more user-friendly WordPress platform. Post-migration cleanup involved several hours manually reassigning posts here and there, reminding me of the times those posts were written.

My impressions: at bottom politics hasn’t changed much since the year 2000, when I published an essay in Modern Age, “The Tyranny of Liberalism”, describing the situation. Then as now we had a public order dominated by an increasingly insane Left, opposed by various people who dislike the tendency in one way or another but mostly lack a coherent position and are very much at the margins of official intellectual and social life. So an analysis that was good then still seems good now.

One thing that has changed is public availability of non-mainstream right-wing thought. The alt.revolution.counter Resource List and Traditionalist Conservatism Page that I put together back then display the situation in the late ’90s and early oughts. They tried to be comprehensive, and list what was out there, but it really wasn’t much — a few small and almost unknown organizations and publications, some books that were mostly rather hard to get, mainstream publications that seemed somehow suggestive, and a few Internet forums that were finally beginning to spring up.

Otherwise, it was really all late-stage postwar consensus, with The New York Times, the successors of Walter Cronkite, and a fairly unified mass culture as the unifying factors, and talk about “the Constitution” and “moral imagination” as the recognized intellectual opposition. Today’s situation on the right is a mess, and it’s not as if the immediate outlook is good, but there’s much more available there, and that seems a big step forward.

Any other thoughts on how things have changed?

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New book!

I’ve been playing hooky from this site for a while, but I hope no one minds if I show up to announce I have a new book coming out, The Decomposition of Man: Identity, Technocracy, and the Church. It’s about the old identities that worked (man, woman, Catholic, American), the new ones that really don’t (Latinx, nonbinary), why the change, whence the lunacy, and what to do about it. The problems go pretty deep, and like everything else today they’re not going to get better unless we change a lot about how we live and think about things.

 

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Our Ecclesiastical Revolutionaries

I thought I’d toss out some impressions of those who have made the current mess in the Church. I have no special knowledge of any of this, but these are indeed my impressions, so other views would be welcome:

Walter Kasper is basically a German engineer. He likes systems that have been thought through and work smoothly and predictably in accordance with well-articulated basic principles. He accepts as a basic reality the German social welfare state that looks after all human concerns and turns the German bishops into well-paid functionaries with large budgets to use as they wish, and he wants to fit the Church seamlessly into that model. Hence the radical disjunction he makes between “praxis” and “doctrine.” By turning doctrine into a sort of decorative accessory, like the British monarchy, that move is the most simple, practical, and reliable way to unify the two in all practical respects. (Germans like thoroughgoing coherence, so it’s not surprising Cardinal Marx has openly suggested changing doctrine as well.)

Francis is quite different. Continue reading →

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A Tale of Two Popes

My Catholic columns this month discuss a call for tradition by Pope Saint Pius X in his encyclical against modernism, and a call for–God knows what?–by soon-to-be-blessed Pope Paul VI in his speech closing the Second Vatican Council.

The speech is fascinating and should be read. Paul VI appears to have been a man with considerable intellectual and spiritual gifts who was unable to take seriously how perverse, obstinate, cruddy, stupid, and downright evil people can be. The problems he saw all around him didn’t make sense, so they must all be a big mistake that would dissolve if we only showed sufficient intelligence and good will so the mistake could be cleared up. That’s how he seemed to come out, even though as an intellectual matter his account of the modern world in the speech was quite astute, as a Catholic he should have remembered that superstrength measures were needed to overcome the world, and in any event he was obviously aware of problems with the Council itself. (Otherwise why talk of its “real and deep intentions” and “authentic manifestations”?)

Reading him reminds me that we’ve had a run of pontiffs who were major figures even though they might not always be perfect or make the right decision. The run seems to have come to an end, and the uninspiring day-to-day reality of the post-Vatican II Church has caught up with us at all levels. That’s no fun, but I can’t say we deserve better.

On other fronts, I have a shorter piece at the Catholic World Report weblog about why the Church should keep making natural law arguments on sexual matters even though nobody can make sense of them (they present essential aspects of the Christian view of reality). There’s also a longer piece at the International Journal of Architectural Research on the architectural theorist Christoper Alexander.

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Socrates, Techno-Speak, and Similar Issues

I have some new or newish pieces up on the current regime and how to fight it. There’s one just out at Crisis Magazine about how bad ideological pluralism is (for starters, it’s a particular system of social control that obviously can’t be pluralistic). There are also a couple at Catholic World Report about why the Church can’t use modern public language to speak to modern man (it’s a sort of technological Newspeak), and about Socratic questioning as a way to disrupt the flow of sophistical patter. And then there’s a piece published at Crisis Magazine during Lent about how to how to be a bit more Lenten if you happen to be a political ranter.

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Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out: Variations on a Theme.

My current brace of columns  includes one at Crisis Magazine about the trend away from concrete loyalties and objective principles toward radical subjectivity and a combination of money and bureaucracy as the basis for what’s still called public life. The other one, at Catholic World Report, makes the obvious point that the result is unlivable and we should all go out and refound Christendom.

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Elsewhere

I have more comments on subsidiarity at Catholic World Report. Basically, I say that the concept is incomprehensible in a liberal technocracy, and to promote it we have to insist in principle on the autonomy of the family and the Church, and act in ways that make its value evident. I also have something about the sad state of internet discussion up at Crisis Magazine. The conclusion: preach the word in season and out of season even if people are morons. You never know who might be reading.

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In Support of Community Organizing!

Or at least self-organizing communities. In support of the latter anti-technocratic cause I have a column on subsidiarity up at Catholic World Report, and also a two-part series about inclusiveness, that universal attack on the possibility of local self-organization, at Crisis Magazine (it can be read here and here). The latter basically gives a thumbnail sketch of the argument of my recent book.