Man of the West

Peak Oil Comment

2012-01-04T09:12:00.001-07:00

Peak Oil is a real, immanent, and very serious problem. It is nothing like Global Warming at all. Here's why.

While there may have been a point in time when the Global Warming hypothesis merited some attention (back when the issue was first mooted, perhaps), subsequent years of sober and rational reflection have shown us that those concerns can be safely dismissed. Mankind simply cannot produce enough carbon dioxide to affect the climate. The scale is too vast, the feedbacks are too complicated, and the other forcing and/or buffering mechanisms we have identified completely swamp whatever paltry effect our miniscule contribution to global greenhouse gas levels may be causing (if there even is such an effect, which we cannot definitively conclude).

On the other hand, the lexicon of alarmist terms with which we have become familiar through the Global Warming debate -- terms like 'tipping point' and 'runaway feedback' -- really do apply in the case of Peak Oil. Just one Iranian nuclear weapon, whether or not it is even detonated, could set off a chain of events which will disturb the world's oil-producing region for the foreseeable future.

There is a human dimension to this problem which most commentators seem oblivious to. Oil in the ground does nobody any good. If it cannot be extracted, bought, sold, transported, and refined into useful products, it might as well not exist. It is human societies which produce and consume oil, and our ability to exploit a resource is conditioned by numerous factors besides the level of stated reserves. You cannot simply assume that we will have the resources and finance capital to utilize unconventional oil sources. You cannot simply assume that "technology" is a silver bullet which will overcome all production hurdles. And only someone blissfully ignorant of all world history could believe that governments will ever "get out of the way" and allow private oil producers to pump the wells dry in a Libertarian fantasy-land. The world is the theater of bloody politics: it always has been and it always will be. People will fight for power, wealth, and security, and many delicate fruits of our exigent civil society -- fruits like easy access to finance capital and loads of money for R&D -- will get trampled in the process. The system of intellectual and financial tensions stretched across the global economy is now so tight that any minor supply disruption could cause the threads to begin to snap. And with the world's advanced economies getting older and deeper in debt, they will not be able to consume oil as efficiently as before. This is just the beginning of a process that will result in a slowdown of the global economy and the outbreak of hostilities. We will have to get used to living in a world where war is more frequent and wealth less taken for granted; a world, in short, of less civilization.

Ultimately, it is man's ability to produce and consume energy efficiently which has peaked. This is the critical measure, the only one that counts in the last analysis. It has a complicated relationship with resource reserve levels, but is not linearly dependent on them. It is more dependent on culture, on the societal discipline which develops the talent necessary to rule the world with the force and intelligence that such requires. The West began depleting that resource quite some time ago.

'Harry Potter' finale exposes Wayne Dyer

2011-07-19T19:39:00.000-06:00

I knew it. I just knew it.

Masculine Compassion

2011-05-22T03:01:00.005-06:00

Speaking as a man (that is to say, not generically as a member of the human race, but specifically as a male), there are certain things I just know—call it masculine intuition, if you will. And from that ineffable font of knowledge there comes also a fine sense for the characteristically masculine type of compassion; a type which is not widely discussed today, for it has largely been buried beneath two centuries of modern socialist-egalitarian rhetoric. That is not to say that there are none who now practice it; but they do so, in a manner of speaking, out of sight, in the hidden courses of life where the warmth of recognition seldom penetrates. It is not much admired openly, still less is it called forth and given its right and its due; for it moves against the basic presuppositions of our era, and consequently it is proscribed, ridiculed, and even eviscerated by the whole tone and timbre of our public existence.

Yet it does not die. It is, however, shifted into the realms of fiction and history, where alone it still seems permissible to venerate it. For there, in fiction and in history—in the timeless sighing of the human spirit, in the worthy accomplishments won by that spirit in the past—there only do we yet find those essential prerequisites which are necessary for comprehending the operations of masculine compassion. We may mention here, as examples of the same (but certainly not an exhaustive list thereof), such things as an acknowledged hierarchy of men and values; a settled and universally accepted understanding of what constitutes virtue, goodness, and the correct ordering of society; the presumption of permanence that attaches to marriage and property; and the duty of men (males), each in his own domain, to rule—to set forth laws and administer punishments—as the good of the place requires. This pattern is instinctive to us and therefore desired by us; however, in accordance with the now ascendant canons of modernism, it cannot be reflected in our ordinary manner of speaking. Thus it will behoove us, unfortunate men of the modern world, to throw off such mannerisms; and, eschewing all pretensions to sophistication, to speak a plain word, heart-spoken and real, in defense of our love and compassion, defining them in contrast to the phony versions thereof with which we’ve been saddled today; and in so doing, free our consciences from the guilt of acting falsely, to the great benefit of ourselves, and to that of the whole world around us.

The plain word, of course, is fatherhood. Masculine love is always an expression of fatherly care, either literally or metaphorically. But no man can act as a father to one who is greater than he; which is why, in all types of society, there must be a social hierarchy with a man at the head of it. In the absence of either one of these conditions, the possibility of fatherhood is implicitly denied. Therefore hierarchy there must needs be if we are to have fathers and be fathers; but we should not confuse this with some merely bestial struggle for primacy within the social group, or with a desire to put down our inferiors and lord our power over them. It is quite the opposite, in fact. The point is worth some attention.

Whenever a good man comes to realize that the person he’s dealing with is truly his spiritual and intellectual inferior, he is borne out of himself on a wave of fatherly compassion which lays claim to the other person and seeks his safety and his good. The bad man, of course, does not feel this way—he tries to exploit the weaknesses of the other. But since this essay is not meant to be a comprehensive treatise on virtues and vices, I will leave off talking about the bad man just yet. For the good man, on the other hand, the feeling is both familiar and, in the ordinary run of things, automatic. It is almost identical with the noblest aspirations he entertains, i.e. the chance to be somebody’s benefactor and hero. I would go so far as to say that a man’s kindly disposition towards his ward is the masculine analogue of the natural affinity women have for infants and children. So strong is this feeling, at times, that it seems not to matter if the inferior man has actually done you an injury in his ignorance and carelessness. You want to redress the wrong, certainly; but you try to do so in such a way that the punishment is not too harsh, that the lesser man may be raised up and tempered by the experience. In such fashion do good men love their children. So even do they care for their wives, domestic servants, and the whole of their extended family. So also do they adopt others, become mentors, take on students and apprentices. To their commercial and public lives they apply something of the same basic attitude. In short, to as much of the world as comes under their care in some capacity, for so much do they feel responsible, and would seek to bower so much under the protective mantle of their foresight, their thoughtfulness, and their courage. And finally, this high-minded gentility is the quality they look for when choosing friends. It is what they expect their friends to display, and what they expect their friends to expect them to display, so that they all may sharpen and perfect one another in goodness and humanity.

Universal among mankind (except in the modern world, that is) is the belief that commanding, courageous fatherhood is a virtue to be cultivated and respected. Universal, too, is the solemnification of the principal rites and practices which lead to fatherhood, or in which fatherhood is notably conferred or exercised. The revelation of the true religion of Christ has done nothing to negate this common conception of mankind; on the contrary it has strengthened it immeasurably. Therefore we can say that, in its plenary aspects, fatherhood is both a natural and a supernatural virtue. It is natural inasmuch as even the pagans practice it, for it appeals to man’s sense of natural goodness, justice, and permanence. It is supernatural inasmuch as God has established himself as Father over all; that He has given His divine blessing to both marriage and worldly authority; and that Christ His son has infused His own dignity into all our acts of care, sealing it with His solemn promise that, for good or for ill, He will count what we do to the least of His brethren as something done unto Himself.

(Now, in the interests of synthesizing and simplifying all that has been said thus far, and before proceeding to other matters, please permit me to offer the following summary. We have said that masculine compassion is something instituted by God as well as something good in itself. We have given this type of compassion a name: We have called it fatherhood, by which we mean to express both fatherhood properly so called, and also the characteristic manner in which men care about anything or anybody inferior to themselves. That the object of fatherly care is inferior to the father who cares for it, is intrinsic to the nature of fatherhood and inseparable therefrom. Absent this condition, fatherhood cannot be said to exist.)

Of all the components and characteristics of fatherhood, it is the unapologetic existence of a hierarchy of individual men and the differing values that they represent, which most directly opposes the sentiments of the modern world. For mention the words ‘lord’ or ‘master’ to anyone of the modern mindset, and you will elicit only negative reactions from him. He hears in such words nothing but the footsteps of tyranny, which he has never actually experienced himself, but which he regards as an ancient menace which his delightful modern society has rightfully put off. Now tyranny and oppression are abuses of the fatherly concept, to be sure; but democracy, egalitarianism, relativism—these deny the very nature of fatherhood. In a world where true lordship can scarcely even establish itself, it is something of a red herring to maintain an exaggerated fear of its prior distortions once again becoming prevalent. But since it is the latter, “popular” qualities for which modernity has set its cap, and since these qualities would not long endure the presence of genuine lords and masters, it is necessary for modernity to somehow prevent lords and masters from showing up its pretensions, which it does by (among other methods) calumniating them as “tyrants and oppressors” when they attempt to exercise their prerogatives. So prevalent is the capacity of modern man to equate authority with oppression, that proper respect for properly constituted authority—and knowledge of the nature and limits thereof—have all but disappeared from the scene. It may be helpful, then, to sketch a picture of masculine authority in action, which we can later contrast with the counterfeit version in vogue today.

So imagine, if you will, a small human community living a relatively uncomplicated life in a rustic setting. We say ‘rustic’ not because we are trying to set up some speculative primitivism as the standard by which to judge modern societies, but simply because, for the purposes of this example, we wish to avoid the logistical complexities introduced by contemporary urban living arrangements. You may allow your community to have machines, internal combustion engines, even electricity if you wish. The important thing is that they cannot count on receiving much outside assistance, nor can they take their standard of living for granted. They depend on their own efforts and on the land around them to supply them with their daily requirements.

Let no one in your community be known to you. In fact, remove them as far as possible from all familiarity. Set them in the distant past, the remote future, or perhaps even on another world. You may wish to endow them with a coat of fur or some other exotic feature, the more so to distance their mere humanity from your own. It goes without saying that you cannot speak their language. Finally, imagine yourself as an invisible man, a secret anthropologist projected into their midst, able to observe them but capable in no wise of interfering with them or even making your presence known. It is true that much of their culture and conversation will be lost upon you, for you will never participate in their mysteries or catch the nuances of their speech; but precisely due to this lack of involvement on your part, the pure and essential facts concerning your subjects—their basic characters and the power relationships that exist between them—will stand forth, bold and denuded of all the attachments and ironies that so complicate such analyses in our own world; and you will see their hearts, perceiving therein the substance, logic, and effects of all their actions, as solid and algebraic as brick-masonry.

Now whom would you call the ‘good men’ in your community?—not merely the ‘successful’ men, as if we were describing the dominant animals in the herd, but the truly good men? They are none other but the ones who bring order to the sprawling life around them. They are the ones who patiently instruct their children in all the important matters of life and conduct, not permitting them to deviate into base habits. They are the ones who order the work of the community, accurately foreseeing distant exigencies, appointing to each member some useful task that lies within the range of his skill, managing all with a wisdom that takes account of the complex interrelations between means and ends. The chiefest among them take thought for the welfare of the entire community and provide for its defense: some representing its interests in the world abroad; some judging cases and mediating disputes at home; while others of a different kind offer fitting sacrifices to the God in the temple, blessing the people and making atonement for their sins, exhorting them to remember those eternal things upon which their continued existence depends, and teaching them to live justly in the sight of the Lord. In other words, they all act like fathers, these good men, taking responsibility to see to it that what needs to be done, is done. They are empowered, each according to his level and his office, with a dignity of command, a sort of prescient beneficence such that disobedience to them seems both a crime and a folly, while obedience to them is revealed as righteousness.

But this power to command is not gotten for nothing; for the leader-man is not permitted to keep his ease or to amuse himself, or to follow his fancies wherever they may lead. He must develop a sort of immunity to ordinary pleasures and pains, must direct his mind toward the things which are higher than himself, and become grave. He must go forth from his comfort to wrestle with the Nothing, the Chaos; for his task is to make sure that his domain adheres to a form of justice which exists nowhere as a material fact but as spirit and contemplation only; a form, moreover, whose inexorable demands endlessly summon him to remake the life around him according to its fashion, while that very life in its wantonness is forever slumping and slipping away from it. So the leader must deny himself and take up his cross. He must knit himself together with cords of iron, shunning any affection, society, fame, or pleasure that threatens to interfere with his purpose. He must become competent at discerning spiritual things; and the things he comes to understand are things he must give away, dispensing incarnate wisdom in the form of edicts, corrections, reproofs, and punishments. He must hold aloof from all that is lesser than he, unless he worketh his love upon it so that it may come up higher. Above all he must strive to bring all things to perfection, such that the community lives in and through the strength of his spirit, feeding off his wisdom and his courage. He must break and divide himself and pour himself out in offering, sanctifying the world around him with lordly acts of chivalry and condescension. And that is masculine compassion. It is like heaven kneeling down to embrace the earth.

Surely such chivalry deserves the name of ‘master.’ Surely it can insist on its right to command, its right to be obeyed. But there will be some who say that this is not compatible with what they’ve been taught about goodness. They will say that the good man is humble, that he does not care to impose his will upon others. They will point to the figure of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet, and telling them that he who wishes to be the greatest among them must be the servant of all. And to these objections I say: Exactly! Commanding is the highest form of service that there is. For who is it who carries more cares, does more work, is more anxious for the future, is more solicitous for the wellbeing of others besides himself, after the manner of servants: the father of many children, or the children playing within his tents? Obviously it is the father. And which of these can truly be said to be the “greatest among them:” the children or the father? Again it is the father; for the children derive their protection, their nourishment, and everything else they possess—and indeed even their very existence—from him. And again, who is it who more carefully attends to a company’s bottom line, or who watches over its assets and husbands its resources more closely: the owner of the company or the wageworker? And who is willing to lay down his life for the sheep: the shepherd or the hireling? But clearly the father who provides for his children has the right to command the ways of their upbringing, lest his work be all wasted when they grow up to become dissolute knaves. Clearly the company owner, who provides his workmen with a living wage, has the right to order their work so that the company does not go bankrupt, and nobody receive a wage. So it is nothing contradictory to suggest that the prerogatives of command are attached to, and even inseparable from, the concept of service. And in response to those who would now reply that I am simply employing a creative use of words here, a kind of obscurantist newspeak which means the opposite of what it says, when I equate lordship with service, let me simply ask you this: Is there any greater disservice a father can do his children than to not raise them properly? Is their any greater disservice that a general can do to his army than to leave them leaderless at the approach of battle? Indeed, to serve by leading is simply an elaboration of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Who but a father proves himself ‘neighbor’ to his children?

So much suffices to describe our good men. Now we must turn our attention to some of the bad men in the community. Certainly some of them will be bullies, abusers, molesters, liars, shucksters, cowards, and dandies. Some of them will be intemperate, drunk, quarrelsome, lazy, and good for nothing. Among the most notable of bad men will be those who appropriate the powers of some office to themselves but are incapable of discharging the duties thereof, being interested only in the amenities of rank and the freedom that their station affords them to indulge their crude appetites. But about these types of men we need no further warnings. All of human culture and human history are already full of admonitions and excoriations concerning them, so there is no need to say much more about them here. These men are obviously bad. They suffer from glaring defects which are difficult to miss, but which they could quite possibly correct if they were willing to work hard at it. I would like to talk instead about the men whose badness is not so obvious, but is all the more insidious for that.

“The corruption of the best is the worst,” said Aristotle; and as is so often the case with Aristotle, nobody can argue with that. Therefore, as we survey the ranks of bad and worthless men falling like flakes of detritus down through our society, we ought to pay special attention to those who are not content with merely corrupting themselves, but are intent on ruining all who follow them. These are the men who pretend to be fathers, but who drag everything down to a lower level rather than raising it up. They are not hard to discover, these false fathers and pseudo-males, especially when you are quite detached from all inward involvement with their society. You will know them by their low standards, by their immodest refusal to put on that dignity which the good of their community requires them to assume. You will see them walking about among the masses, shamelessly fraternizing with the very people whom they are supposed to command, dissolving that pathos of distance without which there can be no respect for any authority whatsoever. In their upside down system of values they call this being compassionate, although in reality compassion has nothing to do with it. It is more a type of theatrical production, a certain persona they affect, which has its root in their codependent personalities. They seem to have had it impressed upon them one too many times, perhaps through pious-sounding phrases which are innocuous enough in themselves, how generous the “good” man is when it comes to helping the poor, how the “good” man will take the shirt off his own back to clothe the poor, etc. But being natural drama-queens themselves, they focus all their attention solely on the performance of the action. They know that such charitable acts—especially the more visible and melodramatic varieties thereof—are already lauded throughout the wide world, and far be it from them to forsake so ready and eager an audience. What be it to them if they lose a shirt, when in return they gain the adulation of the masses that they so slavishly crave? Yet in their continuing quest for popularity they find that they must stoop to ever more and more absurd levels of self-abasement, as if the value of charity consisted not in lifting up the dignity of a fellow man but in disencumbering oneself of one’s own. Any negative consequences they experience as a result of their foolishness—from the ruination of their fortune to the loss of their children’s respect—these they count as a burnt offering made unto God, a further proof of their sincere generosity and their attunement to a spiritual reality perceptible to no inner eye but their own. Thus they gradually lose contact with all real life and sobriety. Their very faculties for understanding actuality become corroded through chronic exposure to the dissipation they call charity and the self-indulgence they call compassion. So here we see a man pretending to be a father, even though—in fever-fits and mad iconoclasms—he is busy destroying both the fruits and the nature of fatherhood wherever he can find them; and there we see him pretending to be a leader, even though his only “leadership” consists in exhorting others to imitate his own vicious sentiments as he drums them down a path that tends to the destruction of all virtues, and ends with both him and his flock shipwrecked in the very abyss of hell. Here, my friends, we see a being who is consumed with the most strident pride, who amplifies the miseries of the world to gain the cheers of the gallery; and who does all this, moreover, under the astonishing supposition that he is being humble!

It is quite a sad spectacle to behold, even among a tribe of hairy-backed foreigners. Yet if this was the uppermost limit of the devastation we might still be compelled to overlook it, however much we pitied the children of such a man, however much we might wish to break our anthropological silence and extend a helping hand to his poor, deluded followers. We may regard it all as a necessary aberration which must be allowed to persist if real charity is to exist in the world. But unfortunately the damage does not stop there; for, you must understand, the pseudo-man’s kabuki theater is not a one-man play. Besides himself he always requires the presence of some wretch to serve as his counter-pole and the object of all his theatrical compassion. Therefore he not only makes a habit of consorting with all manner of undesirables, he soon presses his preference for them to the utmost extremes of irony. This is why, after exalting the common man and trumpeting his ordinary accomplishments, he proceeds to cultivate an especial affinity for the truly stupid. After making an ostentatious display of “mercy” and “understanding” for some notorious ne’er-do-well, he deigns to excuse all criminals from their crimes and absolve them from their punishments. When unwelcome immigrants start showing up in troublesome numbers, he can ever be found among them crowing about “our universal humanity,” the better to show off his broad-minded cosmopolitanism. Saddest to see, perhaps, are the concessions he makes to the enemies of his own country and creed. Not only does he disgracefully praise their good qualities in the public places, but he actively undermines his own people by carping ceaselessly on their supposed faults while remembering none of their virtues. Perhaps there is no need to see any more. At the conclusion of our observations we are tempted to say that these false men, whatever their ostensible motives might be, yet show every sign of being nothing but small, jealous creatures, prideful to a fault and sore contemptuous of all that is not devoted to their worship. Although they advance their whole program under the banner of kindness, liberality, and disinterested care for the world, they have done little more than to re-baptize old villainies as the virtues of a new, enlightened age—and that is NOT masculine compassion. It is the very opposite thereof.

Let us jog on back to our world, the real world, now that our excursion into alternative society has (hopefully) furnished us with some new eyes wherewith to comprehend our own situation more clearly. Who are the false men of here and now that we must beware of? Who are those seducers and deceivers of the people who make great shows of their compassion, but inwardly are filled with bile and the nastiest sort of cunning? We know them at once to be the liberals, socialists, Democrats, internationalists, environmentalists, and other professional mourners who use their twisted sense of morality as cover for their devious power-grabs. And it is not a new discovery, that this is so. The same, or similar, point(s) have been made by others, sometimes at greater length and with more artfulness than what I have done. George Orwell, for instance, owes his enduring fame to several not dissimilar observations, which he largely confined to the political sphere.

My field is otherwise. Before I leave off and commit this essay to the fickle winds of public digest, I would have it known that every charge, every criticism, every rebuke I’ve here laid down, I mean to stick squarely to the foreheads of the Roman Catholic clergy and the mindless dolts who follow them. These are the falsest of false fathers, these pedophile priests, illegal immigrant lovers, world-development enthusiasts, ecumenists, labor union agitators, pacifists, and progressivist punks. They are far worse than any ordinary Leftist, for they have taken the best, noblest, and truest religion—the only religion established by Christ for the salvation of mankind, the Roman Catholic Church—and turned in to another of their fetid illusionist hives. The corruption of the best is the worst. If there are any who still maintain that disaster did not strike with the Second Vatican Council, let them compare the “masculinity” of the churchmen 100 years ago with their counterparts today. Compare the thoughts, writings, gravity, and mien of Pope St. Pius X with, say, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, current president of the USCCB. Compare clerical authority…

…with clerical buffoonery.

Who is the real man here? Which of these would you rather have leading you through the Valley of the Shadow of Death: St. Pius X, who did confront and withstand all heresies, or Timothy Dolan, cheesehead and idiot? The choice seems clear to me. I hereby warn all Catholics everywhere that to follow such men (as Dolan) is dangerous. I warn the clergy that they are leading vast numbers of souls down the easy paths into hell. I admonish everyone to turn themselves around and embrace the faith of our fathers, the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, as it was constituted prior to Vatican II. And I warn you that failure to do this will result in you falling into the pit that is bottomless, there to burn for all eternity. I tell you this to raise you up, to save your soul.

And that, too, is masculine compassion.

Fisking Bishop Conley

2011-05-15T22:14:00.017-06:00

I have never attempted a “fisking” before; but the never-ending stream of garbage coming out of Catholic newspapers, blogs, chanceries, and even the Vatican itself these days, has led me to the conclusion that I need to develop a certain competency with that particular literary form. I have unfortunately picked a monster to begin with. Below the asterisks is the first of a three-part series by James Conley, Auxiliary Bishop of Denver, in which he purports to explain the necessity for the new English-language missal. The original text can be found at the website of the Denver Catholic Register, here. A shorter rendition of the same material can be read in the PDF version of the newspaper’s print edition, here. It was the shorter version I originally intended to fisk, but I was unable to copy and paste the text from the PDF. Therefore I have undertaken to destroy the longer version—I apologize in advance for the tedium. A word about the format of the succeeding criticism: In proper fisking fashion, I have left the Bishop’s own words in plain text. My interposed comments will be rendered in [red bracketed text]. The article will begin beneath the line of asterisks and will end with another such line, after which I will append a few concluding remarks. May God have mercy on this work and use it for the glory of His kingdom and the restoration of His Church. Amen.

************

‘A Universe Brimming with Fruitful Spiritual Life’: Reflecting Transcendence in the Liturgy

Most Rev. James D. Conley, S.T.L., Auxiliary [sic] Bishop of Denver, delivered the following address during the Midwest Theological Forum in Valparaiso, Indiana on April 25, 2011.

I want to begin our conversation by recounting a story a friend told me recently.

During Lent this year, my friend’s parish started the worthy custom of praying the Sanctus and Agnus Dei in Latin.[How wonderful. Liturgical Latin revived as a quaint custom. Tell me, why were they ever prayed in any other language in the first place?] My friend is in his early 50s and we converted to the Catholic Church around the same time during our college years, through a classical “Great Books” program, which included the study of Latin. [So you admit that a classical education is profitable for conversions] He and his wife taught their children Latin at an early age and they sent their children to a private Catholic school where they prayed these prayers in Latin every day at Mass. [Good for them.]

But he and his family were by far the exception at his parish, which is a big, suburban parish made up mainly of young families. He looked around one Sunday and noticed that only his family and some of the older parishioners were praying the Latin. Everybody else looked a little confused. [Is it not the job of the clergy to educate the laity on such arcane matters as, oh, the Liturgical language and principal prayers of the Mass?]

This story gives us some important context for our conversation this evening.

The “new Mass” is almost a half-century old now. A generation of Catholics has grown up knowing only the Novus Ordo. [Do they know nothing of the Church’s history?] I would venture to bet that many younger Catholics have no idea that the prayers we say at Mass are translated from an authoritative Latin text. [if true, an inexcusable oversight on the part of the Bishops.]

In Advent, we are going to introduce a major new English translation of the Mass with the third typical edition of the Roman Missal. [Another one?]

What are Catholics in the pews going to make of the changes in the words they pray and the words they hear the priest praying? Will the changes make any difference in their experience of the Mass? In the way they worship? In the way they live their faith in the world?[If the Novus Ordo had been as innocuous as you say, there would be no need for a new translation to “make a difference." In fact it would be scandalous if there was.]

These are important questions. And the answers are going to depend a lot on you and me.

This new edition of the Missal is the Church’s gift to our generation. It restores the ancient understanding of the Eucharist as a sacred mystery. It renews the vertical dimension of the liturgy — as a spiritual sacrifice that we offer in union with the sacrifice that our heavenly High Priest celebrates unceasingly in the eternal liturgy.

[The above paragraph is pure gobbledygook. In the first place, this is no “gift” to our generation. It is the imposition of yet another distorted Mass in place of the traditional Latin Mass which had worked just fine for centuries prior. Restoring the Latin Mass—now that would be a gift! In the second place, the ancients did not understand the Eucharist as a “sacred mystery.” They understood it in the same way the true Church has always understood it—as making visible Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary, the only pure and unblemished sacrifice in the world. In the third place, the talk about a “vertical dimension” to the liturgy is nothing but obscurantist phenomenological JP2 newspeak. And in the fourth place, Bishop Conley’s final sentence fragment makes neither grammatical nor theological sense. The Eucharist is not a spiritual sacrifice—it is the sacrifice of Calvary, plain and simple. Our heavenly High Priest does not sacrifice himself for us unceasingly in heaven—he is transfigured and impassible. Finally, we do no offer any sacrifices at all. It is Jesus Christ who offers himself through the person of the priest. Nothing we have to offer could possibly affect our salvation.]

In order for the Church to realize the full potential of this gift, it is vital that we understand why we need this new translation. [We would need it only if there was something wrong with the old one—an implicit admission that the old one was no good.] The changes are not superficial ritualism. There is a deep liturgical and theological aesthetic at work. And we need to grasp the “spirit” and “inner logic” underlying these translations.

This is what I want to talk about with you this evening.

As a starting-point, I thought it would be useful to return to the “scene of the crime” so to speak — that is, to the introduction of the Novus Ordo.

Let me say up front: I’m joking here, sort of! I know that some people still talk about the Novus Ordo as if it was a crime. [It was.] I have close and dear friends who feel this way. I can understand their frustration. And I’ll talk about that more in a minute.

But I want to be clear: I was ordained a priest and a bishop in the Novus Ordo. I have spent my entire priesthood praying this Mass with deep reverence. Although I have a great love and appreciation for the Tridentine Rite and I am called upon to celebrate this form of the Mass from time to time, I believe the Novus Ordo is a result of the ongoing organic development of the Roman liturgy. [There can be no development of the Liturgy, “organic” or otherwise. The liturgy was laid down once and for all by Jesus himself at the Last Supper, and was codified for us by Pope St. Pius V at the Council of Trent in the bull Quo Primum. The Latin rite predates the Council of Trent by at least 1000 years. In all that time there has been no organic development. Perhaps the Novus Ordo is one of those 1500-year cicadas?]

I do think it’s important for us, however, to recall the “culture shock” caused by the Novus Ordo back when it was first introduced. [Lamentably there was not enough culture shock to save us from it.] That helps us better understand the concerns and purposes of this new edition of the Missal.

To illustrate what I mean about “culture shock,” I want to recall the experience of Evelyn Waugh, the author of Brideshead Revisited and the Sword of Honor trilogy, among other memorable works. Waugh was a brilliant novelist and essayist. He was a convert to the Catholic Church and he was not bashful about speaking his mind on what he thought was wrong in the Church. We converts can be like that!

And make no mistake: Waugh thought the Church had a made a wrong turn at the Second Vatican Council.

In his correspondence and writings in the Catholic press, Waugh was most disturbed about the Council’s plans for liturgical reform. The reformers, he complained, were “a strange alliance between archeologists absorbed in their speculations on the rites of the second century, and modernists who wish to give the Church the character of our own deplorable epoch.” [Note Bishop Conley does not bother to refute this characterization.]

Waugh certainly had a way with words, didn’t he? And here, as in so many cases, he was razor-keen in his insight.

His worst fears came to pass when the Mass was finally introduced in the vernacular. In early 1965, he wrote to a friend: “Every attendance at Mass leaves me without comfort or edification. … Church-going is now a bitter trial.”

He complained often — as did many others — that the Novus Ordo stripped the Mass of its ancient beauty and destroyed the liturgy’s contact with heavenly realities. Waugh for one, never recovered from the shock. He would say things like: “The Vatican Council has knocked the guts out of me,” and “I shall not live to see things righted.”

Waugh’s end reads like something out of one of his novels.

On Easter 1966, he asked a Jesuit friend to say a Latin Mass for him and a handful of his friends and family at a private chapel near his home. People later remarked that Waugh seemed at peace for the first time since the Council. About an hour after the Mass, he collapsed and died.

It was a dramatic ending to a fascinating and complicated life. [How could you miss the import of a story like that? Yet like the scribes and Pharisees, Bishop Conley fails, and fails utterly, to read the signs of the times.]

The lesson I want to draw here is this: Evelyn Waugh was on to something. He sensed that something had gone awry. [Yes, it was called Vatican II.]

But he was wrong not to trust the Holy Spirit’s guidance of the Pope, the Church and the Council fathers if, in fact, he did begin to despair with the direction the Church was headed. God in his kind providence spared him the experience of much of the post-conciliar silliness and the gross liberties taken with the liturgy. [Now the Bishop has devolved into pure blasphemy. How could the Holy Spirit be responsible for a reform which resulted in so much chaos and lost 75% of the Church?]

The Novus Ordo is an organic development of the Church’s ancient liturgical rites and traditions. It is a genuine sign of Christ’s faithfulness to his promise — that his Spirit would guide the Church into all the truth and would glorify him in all things. [Attributing the works of Satan to the Holy Ghost is an unforgivable sin.]

But the new does not replace the old in the Church. [At Vatican II, it did.] There is always continuity and not rupture when it comes to the authentic development of doctrine — and also when it comes to the authentic development of the liturgy. [Authentic doctrine cannot develop. The deposit of faith was sealed with the death of the Apostles. That goes for liturgy, too.]

I believe our Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, like Pope John Paul II before him, has given us a healthy way to think about the relationship between the Novus Ordo and what Benedict calls the forma extraordinaria. [The traditional Latin Mass which held for 15 centuries is now “extraordinary?”] They are not two distinct liturgical rites. They are two expressions of the one Roman rite. [What sort of nonsense is this? One rite needs only one expression. If the other one is not superfluous then it is different. If it is different, it is defective.]

As I said, I have great love and appreciation for the Tridentine, or “extraordinary form” of the Mass. But I also see how the ordinary form, the Novus Ordo, has nourished and sanctified the spiritual lives of countless souls over the past 40 plus years. [25% Mass attendance? Catechetical crisis? Pedophile priests? Parish closures?] It has helped the Church to rediscover the Eucharist as the source and summit of our lives. [This exactly contradicts what you said earlier about the need for a new translation.] And we cannot forget that this Mass nourished the spiritual lives of two great figures of our generation — Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta and the soon-to-be Blessed John Paul II. [Two heterodox Catholic “Blesseds” attested with dubious miracles.]

And yet.[Bishop Conley, your two-word, once-sentence paragraphs are making my HTML coding unnecessarily difficult. If you must take theology lessons from Rob Bell, could you at least refrain from taking writing lessons from him also?]

And yet I think many of us would agree with Waugh on this point: Something has been lost. Something of the beauty and grandeur of the liturgy. Something of the reverence, the mystery, the sense of the transcendent. [You don’t say?] This has been a persistent criticism since the Council — and not only from so-called traditionalists.

But I can’t agree with those who blame the Novus Ordo or the vernacular. This answer is too facile. [Oh, please! A subtle ad hominem from a man of your station? Yes, you’re right. It is just so utterly facile to think that changing the language and rubrics of the Mass somehow altered the character thereof. Silly me. What do languages and rubrics matter?]

The problem has been with the way the New Mass has sometimes been understood and implemented. [Certainly that can have nothing to do with the language or the rubrics now, can it?]

I, along with not a few friends, have had the unfortunate experience that Pope Benedict has described in his 2007 "Letter to the Bishops of the world" when he issued his Apostolic Letter, Summorum Pontificum, on the use of the Roman Liturgy prior to the Reforms of 1970:

“In many places celebrations were not faithful to the prescriptions of the new Missal, but the latter actually was understood as authorizing or even requiring creativity, which frequently led to deformations of the liturgy which were hard to bear. I am speaking from experience … I have seen how arbitrary deformations of the liturgy caused deep pain to individuals totally rooted in the faith of the Church.”

Again, the problem is not the Novus Ordo — but the license that people sometimes take in celebrating it. [A situation which the Bishops could have amended with the stroke of a pen had they shown the slightest interest in doing so.]

I would add that another big part of the problem has been the translations we’ve been using. [So I guess language does have something to do with it. Never mind the fact that you cannot really “translate” anything. Every translation must necessarily be a paraphrase.]

There is a banal, pedestrian quality to much of the language in our current liturgy. [What happened to your beloved “organic development?”] The weakness in the language gets in the way and prevents us from experiencing the sublime spiritual and doctrinal ideas woven into the fabric of the liturgy.

The translators had well-meaning pastoral intentions. [Which evidently included deceiving and insulting the flock.] They wanted to make the liturgy intelligible and relevant to modern Catholics. [An expedient which no other generation required.] To that end, they employed a translation principle they called “dynamic equivalence.”

In practice, this led them to produce an English translation that in many places is essentially a didactic paraphrase of the Latin. [What else could it be?] In the process, the language of our Eucharistic worship — so rich in scriptural allusion, poetic metaphor and rhythmic repetition — came to be flattened out and dumbed down.

Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Canberra, Australia has observed that our current translation “consistently bleaches out metaphor, which does scant justice to the highly metaphoric discourse” of the liturgy. [Save the words ‘metaphor’ and ‘discourse’ for the Humanities department.]

This describes the problem well.

Archbishop Coleridge, by the way, is a translator by training. He headed the committee of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) that produced the new translation we will begin using in Advent.

He has pointed out serious theological difficulties with our current translations, including problems related to ecclesiology and the theology of grace. [So how can you honestly maintain that the previous Novus Ordo translation was licit?]

The key point here is that the words we pray matter. What we pray makes a difference in what we believe. Our prayer has implications for how we grasp the saving truths that are communicated to us through the liturgy.

For instance, our current translation almost always favors abstract nouns to translate physical metaphors for God. If the Latin prayer refers to the “face” of God, “face” will be translated in abstract conceptual terms, such as “presence.” References to God’s “right hand” will be translated as God’s “power.”

This word choice has deep theological implications.

The point of the Son of God becoming flesh is that God now has a human face — the face of Jesus. Jesus is the image of the invisible God. Whoever sees him sees the Father.

Yet if in our worship we speak of God only in abstract terms, then effectively we are undermining our faith in the Incarnation. [A rather serious charge to lay at the feet of an “organically developed” Mass. You heard it here, folks: Bishop Conley admits the Novus Ordo undermines faith in the Incarnation.]

As Archbishop Coleridge says: “The cumulative effect [of abandoning human metaphors for God] is that the sense of the Incarnation is diminished. God himself seems more abstract and less immediate than ever he does in Scripture or the Church Fathers.”

I want to say this again: I don’t believe there were bad motives involved in the translations we have now. [No, of course not. Presumably the Holy Spirit, who is supposed to prevent theological error from creeping into the Mass, was simply negligent in His duties.]

I think the root problem with the translations we have now is that the translators seriously misunderstood the nature of the divine liturgy. [And now we are supposed to trust that these rubes have corrected their own errors?]

Our current translations treat the liturgy basically as a tool for doing catechesis. That’s why our prayers so often sound utilitarian and didactic; often they have a kind of lowest-common-denominator type of feel. That’s because the translators were trying to make the “message” of the Mass accessible to the widest possible audience. [It was never their job to mess with it.]

But Christ did not give us the liturgy to be a message-delivery system. Of course, we pray what we believe, and what we pray shapes what we believe. Lex orandi, lex credendi. But the liturgy is not meant to “teach” in the same way that a catechism teaches, or even in the same way that a homily teaches.

On this point, the words of the great liturgical pioneer[?], Father Romano Guardini, are worth hearing again:[Christ is the only liturgical “pioneer.” Anyone else who tried such a thing is a heretic. I guarantee that Msgr. Guardini thought of himself in no such way.]

The liturgy wishes to teach, but not by means of an artificial system of aim-conscious educational influences. It simply creates an entire spiritual world in which the soul can live according to the requirements of its nature. ….

The liturgy creates a universe brimming with fruitful spiritual life, and allows the soul to wander about in it at will and to develop itself there. ….

The liturgy has no purpose, or at least, it cannot be considered from the standpoint of purpose. It is not a means which is adapted to attain a certain end — it is an end in itself.

This is the authentic spirit of the liturgy.

As Guardini says, the liturgy aims to create a new world for believers to dwell in. A sanctified world where the dividing lines between the human and the divine are erased. [This is utterly false. It indicates some sort of pantheistic or polytheistic thinking, both of which are heretical.] Guardini’s vision is beautiful: “The liturgy creates a universe brimming with fruitful spiritual life.”

The new translation of the Mass restores this sense of the liturgy as transcendent and transformative. It restores the sacramentality to our liturgical language. [Another meaningless phrase. Liturgical language is not itself sacramental; it is not a repository of magic formulae. But if, by the Bishop’s own admission, the previous translation was not “sacramental,” what of the validity of those Masses?] The new translation reflects the reality that our worship here joins in the worship of heaven.

The new edition of the Missal seeks to restore the ancient sense of our participation in the cosmic liturgy.

The Letter to the Hebrews speaks of the Eucharist bringing us into the heavenly Jerusalem to worship in the company of angels and saints. The Book of Revelation starts with St. John celebrating the Eucharist on a Sunday. In the midst of this, the Spirit lifts him up to show him the eternal liturgy going on in heaven.

The message is clear: The Church’s liturgy is caught up in the liturgy of the cosmos. And our Eucharistic rites have always retained this vision of the cosmic liturgy. [Always, that is, except when bad translations ruined for 50 years at a time, requiring even more translations, etc.]

The Gloria and the Sanctus are two obvious points of contact. In the first, we sing the song that the angels sang at the Nativity. In the latter, we sing in unison with the angelic choirs in heaven; we sing the song that both St. John and the prophet Isaiah heard being sung in the heavenly liturgy.

The oldest of our Eucharistic Prayers, the Roman Canon, lists the names of the 12 apostles along with 12 early saints. This is meant to correspond to the 24 elders who John saw worshipping around the heavenly altar.

The Roman Canon also includes a prayer for the holy angels to bring the sacrifices from our altar up to God’s altar in heaven.

And of course the Communion Rite includes the Vulgate’s translation of the invitation that St. John heard in the heavenly liturgy: Blessed are those who are called to the Supper of the Lamb.

Yet we need to recognize that this experience of the heavenly liturgy has been lost since Vatican II. [Argument by spurious apposition. How twisted can one train of logic get?]

This loss is reflected — I’m tempted to say abetted — by our current translation. For the last 40 years we have erased this heavenly reference in the Communion Rite with our bland translation: Happy are those who are called to his Supper.

Again: the words we pray matter. What we pray makes a difference in what we believe.

The Mass is truly a partaking in the worship that St. John saw around the throne and the altar of God. This is not a beautiful idea, but a sacred reality.

This is the teaching of the New Testament, the Church Fathers, the Second Vatican Council, and the Catechism, which contains numerous references to the heavenly liturgy.

And for years now, Pope Benedict XVI has been urging the Church to reclaim this appreciation of the cosmic liturgy, to reclaim our great liturgical patrimony. [The Pope “urges” the Church to reclaim its own theology? Why doesn’t he simply command it?]

I want to underline these words of the Holy Father: “The essential matter of all Eucharistic liturgy is its participation in the heavenly liturgy. It is from thence that it necessarily derives its unity, its catholicity, and its universality.” [‘Universality’ and ‘catholicity’ mean the same thing. ‘Unity’ is redundant in this context. Here you see a typical example of Ratzinger’s much touted “brilliance.”]

The essential matter of our Eucharist is its participation in the liturgy of heaven. In other words: that’s what the Eucharist is all about. The Eucharist we celebrate on earth has its source in the heavenly liturgy. And the heavenly liturgy is the summit to which our Eucharistic celebration looks.

Yet how many of our people in the pews — how many of our priests at the altar — feel that they are being lifted up to partake in the heavenly liturgy? [And who but clergy are to blame for that?]

This is why this new translation is so important. [Yes, because the first attempt to make the eternal liturgy relevant to the unique needs of modern man failed, we must have a second attempt.]

I want to look briefly now at some of the changes in this new translation. I want to meditate on these changes and suggest some ways in which these changes might enhance our appreciation of the essential transcendent dimension of the liturgy.

Many of the changes are small and subtle — but even in these we can sense a shift.

For instance: in one of the forms introducing the Penitential Rite, the priest will now pray: “You are seated at the right hand of the Father to intercede for us.” Currently, of course, we pray: “You plead for us at the right hand of the Father.”

What’s the big difference?

The new translation lifts our gaze to heaven and asks us to contemplate Christ seated at the right hand of the Father and there interceding for us.

By contrast, the translation we have now aims to be didactic and efficient. It scrubs the metaphor and hence the vision of our Lord in heaven. It opts instead to give us information about what Jesus is doing for us.

The original Latin — ad déxteram Patris sedes, ad interpellándum pro nobis — combines two quotations from the Letter to the Hebrews. And it’s not just a random allusion to the Vulgate. It was chosen quite deliberately from Hebrews’ meditation on Christ’s heavenly high priesthood.

In the New Testament, to be “seated at the right hand” describes Christ’s divine power and authority. By removing the metaphorical reference to his being seated, our current translation weakens our prayer. This sense of weakness is reinforced by the decision to translate interpellándum by the word “plead” — which in common English usage suggests an inferior or powerless position.

In restoring a faithful translation of the Latin, the new Missal redirects our worship toward heaven. We pray, confident in our Father’s mercy, knowing we are in contact with our High Priest — who “is seated at the right hand of the throne of the Majesty in heaven,” and “always lives to make intercession” for us. [I thought the purpose of the Mass was not to do catechesis.]

Another example is the epiclesis in Eucharistic Prayer II. [The new rite needs multiple Eucharistic prayers. Apparently one isn’t good enough.]

Currently we pray:

Let your Spirit come upon these gifts to make them holy, so that they may become for us the Body and Blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ.

The new translation restores the repetitive language and the biblical metaphor found in the Latin text:

Make holy, therefore, these gifts, we pray, by sending down your Spirit upon them like the dewfall, so that they may become for us the Body and Blood of our Lord, Jesus Christ.

Restoring the Latin here gives us a much richer prayer. [Restoring the Latin everywhere would give us our Mass back. What’s the holdup?] It also stresses that the liturgy is not our work, but the work of God, who sends down his Spirit from heaven.

The key word is “dewfall,” rore in the Latin. It is a poetic metaphor that is filled with Scriptural significance. Of course, the allusion here is to how God fed his chosen people with manna that he sent down from heaven with the morning dew. We are also meant to associate this with Christ calling the Eucharist the true manna, the true “bread which comes down from heaven.”

Again and again, this new translation reminds us how steeped our liturgical language is in the vocabulary and thought-world of sacred Scripture.

In just this epiclesis, for instance, we have not only the reference to the heavens that drop down manna with the dewfall. We also have an allusion to the sending down of the Spirit — upon the earth at creation, upon Mary at the Annunciation, Christ at his Baptism, the Church at Pentecost, and each one of our hearts at our Baptism.

Considered prayerfully, we can see that the Spirit’s action on the altar in the liturgy continues the Spirit’s work of creation and redemption in history.

We also must not forget that 80% of the prayers in the Roman Missal date before the 9th century. We have a duty to hand these treasures on faithfully and accurately. [Faithfully and accurately—like, in Latin, perhaps? I don’t even know how to properly ridicule absurdity of this magnitude.]

Vatican II taught that every petition, prayer, hymn, liturgical sign and action draws its inspiration, substance and meaning from sacred Scripture. [So Vatican II went sola scriptura?]

This is reflected in our new translations.

And this is deliberate. This is what the Vatican intended in Liturgiam Authenticam, the important statement of translation principles that it issued back in 2001.

I think what I like about this Vatican statement is its realism. No matter what the fads in liturgy or catechesis, the Vatican is determined to keep us “real.” [Whatever]

Liturgiam Authenticam says: “The words of the Sacred Scriptures, as well as the other words spoken in liturgical celebrations … are not intended primarily to be a sort of mirror of the interior dispositions of the faithful; rather, they express truths that transcend the limits of time and space.”

And when it comes to translating the Latin texts of the liturgy, Liturgiam Authenticam also invokes the same principles of realism.

We will be blessed, as a Church, that in this new edition of the Missal, the translators took these principles to heart.

This is important. Because the liturgy is not only an aesthetic event. It is not only about praying beautiful words. The Scriptures are the inspired Word of God. They are the Word of God in the words of human language.

In the liturgy, we are praying to God in the very words of God. And God’s Word is power. God’s Word is living and active. That means that the words we pray in the liturgy are “performative.” They are not words alone, but words that have the power to do great deeds. They are words that can accomplish what they speak of.

As priests, when we speak Christ’s words in the Eucharist — or in any of the sacraments — these words possess divine power to change and transfigure. “This is my Body … This is the chalice of my Blood.” When we speak these words by the power of the Spirit, bread and wine are marvelously changed.

The words of the liturgy are able to create “a universe brimming with spiritual life.” By these words we are summoned into the stream of salvation history. By these words we are able to offer ourselves in sacrifice to the Father, in union with Christ’s own offering of his Body and Blood. By these words we are being transformed, along with the bread and the wine on the altar. [You’ve got to be kidding me! Here’s a new trend in Catholic theology: the transubstantiation of the congregation.] We are becoming more and more changed into Christ, more and more assimilated to his life.

That’s why it is so important that we implement this new translation with a profound Eucharistic catechesis and mystagogy. [Catechesis again? I thought that was supposed to be out.]

Through this new translation, we need to invite our brothers and sisters to know the liturgy as a mystery to be lived. As Pope Benedict has said, our Eucharistic mystagogy must inspire “an awareness that one’s life is being progressively transformed by the holy mysteries being celebrated.”

That is the great promise of this new translation and new edition of the Missal. The promise of a people nourished and transformed by the sacred mysteries they celebrate. The promise of a people who are able to offer themselves as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God. [This is a rather confusing conflation of the Eucharistic liturgy with Paul’s admonition concerning mortification of the flesh.] A people who experience Christ living in them, as they are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another.

I want to leave you with one last image. I hope it will inspire you to always celebrate the sacred liturgy with passionate intensity [gettin’ jiggy with it] and a keen awareness of the liturgy of heaven.

One of his altar servers left us this description of how St. Josemaría Escrivá used to pray the Mass.

For [St. Josemaría], the liturgy was not a formal act but a transcendent one. Each word held a profound meaning and was uttered in a heartfelt tone of voice. He savored the concepts. … Josemaría seemed detached from his human surrounding and, as it were, tied by invisible cords to the divine. This phenomenon peaked at the moment of consecration. … Josemaría seemed to be disconnected from the physical things around him … and to be catching sight of mysterious and remote heavenly horizons.

Thank you for your attention this evening. I look forward to our conversation.

************

Concluding Remarks

Well dear reader, I hope you did not experience as much tedium in reading that as I did in writing it. Bishop Con-job is repetitive, illogical, self-contradictory, and condescending—in short, he is a typical representative of the Novus Ordo and its entire attitude towards God and his people. Truly a more thorough refutation of his points is in order, but I hope I have managed with my pithy quips to convey some sense of the towering absurdity in which he engages. Evelyn Waugh was evidently killed of by the New Mass, but does Bishop Conley draw the moral? Waugh can no longer experience suffering, for he is in Paradise with the rest of the real Catholics. But we on earth can relate to his sensation of having the guts knocked out of him. I feel it every time I go to Mass.

Bishop Conley tells us that blaming the vernacular is too “facile,” and then proceeds himself to blame the vernacular. He tells us that the Mass is not supposed to be about catechesis, and then he tells us that it is. He tells us that we must preserve the ancient rites of the Church in the very course of justifying a new translation of the Mass. He argues by apposing baldly contradictory sentences (the common use of this technique amongst postconciliar churchmen deserves a post of its own). In short, I find his speech to be both insulting and ridiculous.

These problems would not exist if we had stuck with the Latin Mass, the Mass set down for all time in “Quo Primum. Why is modern man the only generation so stupid as to require his Mass to be explained to him in the vernacular? Why did the “organic development” of the liturgy choose to take a 1500 year vacation before springing forth with the delightful Novus Ordo, which even Bishop Con-job admits is “theologically defective?” Why did the Holy Spirit inspire a Mass so badly translated that it now requires further amendment, 50 years later. Obviously these questions have no answer, because the entire thing is a fraud. This is being done only to mask the growing awareness that the Second Vatican Council was an infidel synod which was convened to introduce destructive elements into the Church. The sooner it is forgotten about, the better. We need to support the traditional Latin Mass and traditional Catholic theology. Henceforth, that shall be the mission and purpose of this blog.

Google Blogger Sucks

2011-05-13T16:48:00.001-06:00

Attention "Man of the West" readers (both of you -- you know who you are)!

As we all know by now, Google Blogger has been out of commission for the last day or so. This caused my two most recent posts to temporarily disappear. They have now reappeared on the blog but the 'labels' beneath each post were incorrectly displayed. When I edited the posts to fix the labels, the posts reappeared on the blog in the opposite order that I wrote them in.

I hope this hasn't caused too much confusion. Since my content at least is back on the blog, I'm not going to mess around editing them anymore. I hope that Google has resolved these issues, and that there will not be any more problems with additional posts. A new essay is on its way -- will be here either tonight or sometime this weekend.

Thanks,
-Matt

Getting back to normalcy: How do we do that?

2011-05-13T16:34:00.000-06:00

A helpful reader, commenting anonymously, left this response in reference to my 9/11 Memoir post. I thought his comments and questions merited more than just a quick combox response, so I beg his leave to quote them here and answer them in a new post. To wit:

Matt-

Great post. Years ago at BC I praised your sensibilities and eloquence when other were browbeating you and encouraged you to keep on in that direction. I'm glad you did, the results are evident.

I read with especial interest the part about the obsession with authority with regard to the Truther movement.

Your analysis is spot on with regards to the left and its dysfunctional attitude towards authority. I've always thought that nearly all of those people who put on bumper sitckers reading "Question Authority" really mean "disrespect authority". A few opportunistic, faux conservatives have made these mistakes too, albeit far fewer. However, I would have to point out that this approach is not limited to leftists on the political spectrum. A disturbing number of doctrinaire, capital "L" libertarians also share this dysfunction.

At the time of the 9/11 attacks I was a pretty out-there libertarian. The libertarians had coopted much of the neocon language about the end of history, and it seemed that the age of anarcho-capitalism was upon us and that it would be a good thing. It seemed that the left was on the ropes and that we would enter a new age, a return to the decency and normalcy you reference elsewhere in your essay. I would guess that a lot of folks with libertarian, conservative tendencies were traipsing this way - it sure seemed like it at the time.

The 9/11 attacks changed that forever for me. While I still buy into much of what libertarians tout - "bill of rights" type negative liberties, free enterprise, and limited government - I also have come to realize that the world is a dangerous, nasty place, and that some level of authority must exist in order to deal with the nastiness. And my fellow traveler libertarians were so wrapped up in their avoidance of obeying authority that they couldn't or wouldn't understand what was going on. I discovered what I should have known all along - that they were, like leftists, more interested in power and more interested in winning some imagined debate than they were in doing the right thing. It was then that I reconnected with a more true form of conservatism, and, not so surprisingly, became interested in philosophers and theologians who decried those folks more interested in what they CAN do than what they SHOULD do (in other words, doctrinaire liberals and libertarians).

My conservatism will always be laced with strong libertarian sensibilities. I guess that's just how I'm built. But the straight line stuff no longer has a hold on me.

OK, then, the question is now this. The American public, wanting a return to normalcy after 75 years of Gramscian and overt leftism, modernism, and postmodernism, is simply voting for "something different" every six or eight years in the hopes of acheiving said return (almost as if by magic), but failing each time. How do we break this cycle and get to that return?

Dear Anonymous,

First of all, thank you very much for your kindness and encouragement. I, too, remember the days before 9/11 as a great heyday for the more philistine sorts of libertarianism. Those were the days when the tech bubble was roaring along and it seemed like the stock market could only go up. The Internet was still a relatively new phenomenon then, but it was growing by leaps and bounds. With new technological breakthroughs seemingly happening every day and a slew of popular writers touting our techno-libertarian future to the skies, it was easy to go along with the idea that humanity was turning a corner. Plus, the Greenspan Put had flooded the world with easy money; and the millennium which was then fast dawning upon us had everybody already disposed to think grand, unbridled thoughts of transcendence and progress. It felt like a time to cut loose, and people did. (Now you’ve got me thinking of writing another memoir! But not here, not yet.)

The question before us is, How do we disentangle ourselves from Gramscian Leftist agitprop and get back to normalcy? I think the answer must come in two parts. First, we ought to address what “normalcy” is. What sort of background exists in the minds and attitudes of men who desire normalcy and live in normalcy? That will be the first step towards a complete answer. The second step will involve outlining the sort of work that needs to be done on a daily and hourly basis in order to affect the changes we would like to see in society. It’s all connected, of course, but some explication might help to make the matter clearer.

As for what normalcy is, I would answer by saying that the idea of normalcy has an unmistakable root which can be described as either “perennial philosophy” or “real metaphysical religion.” These terms are crucial to understanding what a “normal” person wants and desires, what a “normal” government should aspire to, and so forth. Let’s take them one at a time.

Perennial Philosophy: By this I mean the notion that the nature of things is essentially unchangeable. All things have a nature; even “nature” has a nature; and so do human beings. The nature that a thing has defines what it is good for and what is good for it. Since our human nature does not change, the same things that were good and noble for us to do yesterday are still good and noble today. No innovation can change that which constitutes basic morality and virtue. Furthermore, the forms in which human beings live virtuously or to which they apply their virtues—families, realms, guilds, the Church—are meant to last forever. The betrayal of them is universally recognized as a failing, a sin. The perennial philosophy recommends to us how to live harmoniously with natural and supernatural nature. This is the golden quality that we recognize at once in the world’s greatest thinkers, men like Homer, Aristotle, Seneca, and Confucius. It is brought to perfection in Christ.

Real Metaphysical Religion: The modern world treats religion as if it were a subjective psychological phenomenon, as if its only purpose was to promote social adjustment, cooperation, politeness, and community. This is merely a modern notion, and it is both false and shallow. Religion makes no sense unless the gods are real. According to the traditional understanding, we worship God or gods because they are mighty beings who command both obedience and respect. They have the power to make our prayers and sacrifices efficacious. They have the power to save us or damn us. They have handed down certain rites to us by which they prefer to be worshipped, and so forth. The perennial philosophy reaches its conclusion by teaching us that the highest end of man is “contemplation,” i.e. the divine life, living and abiding in the same reality which is God Himself. All real religion aims at this goal and is worthy of respect; but we who have received the benefit of Revelation know that the goal is reached only through Christ, who is the Word made Flesh.

So the “normal” man is one who lives virtuously, who honors God through a proper attitude of worship, who is loyal to lord and kin, who preserves intact the lands and wisdom of his ancestors, and who absorbs and reflects the permanence of permanent things. This is the eternal man, the man who fulfills the end of man in accordance with man’s unchangeable nature. Obviously, he is not the modern man. The modern man recognizes no end, no God, no measure by which to judge himself except his own fickle impulses. Modern man is a gangrel creature who is throwing away his dignity and his lordship over the earth, and heaping a shame upon his head which will echo for generations down the road. But in the background of the normal man stands God, who created the man to tend His garden. This is what gives the normal man his tincture of divinity.

The second part of our question now becomes, What should the normal man “do” now that modern man has taken over the planet? How can he go back to living his normal life again in permanence and peace?

I will not attempt to offer you glib solutions, for certainly this will be a long and grueling battle which will rise to world-historical proportions and will cost many men their lives before it’s over. But that doesn’t mean that the answer isn’t straightforward—it is. We first have to win the battle for our own minds by embracing perennial philosophy and real metaphysical religion. Then we simply have to fight Gramsci inch for inch in the larger culture. This is done by setting our faces steadfast against the Left and never accepting their premises. We have to call them out, expose their lies, and let everyone see that truth and logic are on the side of perennial conservatism not Leftist innovation. We must fight them materially at the ballot box, the school board meeting, the internet comboxs and call-in radio shows. We have to stop paying attention to television, preferably by turning it off. We have to drain life away from the education establishment by sending our children to private schools, or home-schooling them. We have to elect candidates (not the candidates proffered by the existing party structure, but members of our own circle) who will bring down the welfare state and simplify the tax code. Indeed in most cases we already know what we should do, but we need to gird up our loins and do it. We will build a virtuous society by living virtuously, for the key to acquiring any skill is to begin to do those things which we will have to do once we’ve acquired it, as Aristotle says. A strong person is one who can lift a heavy weight. How can I become stronger? By lifting heavy weights.

And at this juncture, I think what we have to do most is get intellectual. We must endeavor to explain perennial conservatism with as much philosophical depth, poetry, and inward force of expression as we can attain. The life of a political essayist and cultural critic is always one of showing your heart to the world, of displaying for all and sundry just who you are and what you would do if you were in charge. Well, this is what we need to do. It will not only get events moving in the right direction but it will help us develop strength for when we really are in charge.

I call my blog “Man of the West” in part because I believe the Tolkienian legendarium provides an excellent basis for talking about tradition (another one is Frank Herbert’s Dune.) It is sad that the only place where you can find real virtues today is in works of fiction. But we have an excellent opportunity to take those stories and explain why they’re important, to inspire others to live up to a higher standard. I touched upon the matter in another Belmont Club post called “What could go wrong.” If you’ll permit me to close with this, it explains somewhat passionately what we have to do:

***************

Here is my metaphorical take on the bureaucratic problem.

The films Blazing Saddles and Monty Python and the Holy Grail each make use of an ironic ending which unmakes all that came before it. Instead of bringing closure, the movie spills out into the real world and the wild cast of characters is either hauled away by police or comically juxtaposed against contemporary mores. It is perhaps the most dissatisfying type of ending a movie could have, as it mocks the transcendent possibilities of life and art. It is more like the uncomfortable experience of having to leave the theater than it is like the cause of one’s leaving the theater, as the end of a movie must be in any case. Who does not recall, as a child, being utterly uplifted by some movie which depicted acts of heroism and freedom and natural beauty; and then, with the magic of the film still suffusing your mind like an incense, being rudely deflated by the trauma of emerging from the cool dark of the cinemaplex and out into the world, where there was nothing to greet you but the noonday sun glinting of a thousand windshields, and your loud-mouth friends who couldn’t give a damn that you were just briefly in the company of God? Awakening from the sweet dream and finding that nothing has changed on this side of the wardrobe, you begin to resent that the parking-lot world offers so little in the way of transcendence. When that kind of ending is brought into the movie itself, you feel like your very aspiration to transcendence has been rendered ridiculous, that it was silly to ever hope for anything in the first place.

It is the task of every modern bureaucracy to always bring about the ironic ending. “They” are the bobbies who lock up the crusading heroes, the boom-and-mike intruders who trample into the picture and poison the dream. As long as the bulk of mankind still cherishes a transcendent ideal, society moves along unconsciously and the sublime things that we all know to be true are left relatively unmolested. The highest aspirations that burn in the hearts of men—aspirations for love, victory, and permanence—can find adequate expression. Certainly such a society does not turn all its inhabitants into saints, for there is much unbelief and selfishness in every era. But the norms are there, the paths of virtue are clearly marked out; and a man finds that whenever he desires to do good, he is able to do good.

Not so in the bureaucratic state. The vulgar-souled apparatchiks live entirely in the world of glass and concrete. They have never been to Neverland, and they don’t know how to fly. You cannot do good in a bureaucracy because, for the bureaucrats, the term has an entirely artificial meaning. Authentic charity is replaced by brittle utopian solidarity for the procurement of “rights.” Faith, family, property, country, and everything most dear to the heart, is proscribed or brutally repressed. This is the end of genuine humanity. We do not often see it under this terrifying aspect because we live too close to it, are too painfully involved in it. But it is now fully possible to sketch out just what a horrible price we have paid for the false hopes of modernity. Why have we made war against the family? Abortion and no-fault divorce have ruined more lives than a thousand tsunamis. When beholding the ruin of Japan, let no one lift up his eyes to the heavens and say “God, why did this happen?” For then God will show us the faces of 50 million babies and say, “Why did THIS happen?” The bigger catastrophe is the one we’ve inflicted on ourselves. And why, for what?

Now it occurs to us that we need to fight back, only that isn’t so simple to do. Your every attempt to act like a hero will be met with stony repression. Nothing authentic can be permitted in the parking-lot; heroism lives on only inside the theater. It is okay to cheer for the Greeks at Thermopylae—in the theater. Don’t you dare try to act like that in real life, or it’s hemlock and exile for you. Or perhaps you’ve just seen The Sound of Music and you’re inspired to throw some pebbles at your girlfriend’s window. Forget about it—the neighbors will call the cops. If you want to get her pregnant in the Taco Bell crapper you can have a state-sponsored abortion, but don’t try being romantic. It’s politically incorrect.

So what can a defender of truth do when the enemy is inside the fortress; and not only inside the fortress, but sitting on the throne? At this point the most effective measure is the Heideggerian concept of “releasement,” otherwise known as the Puddleglum Solution. Do not listen to the lies any longer; give them no place in your being; stomp out the bewitching fire and say, “I look around me and I see no trace of Narnia. In my despair I cannot recall that Narnia ever existed. But I would rather live as if Narnia existed than put up with you anymore. I am not going to live in the parking-lot!” This will at least create a bastion behind which others can get to work. The first step in the struggle is necessarily spiritual. It is a matter of conscience and resolve.

The Age of the Blogger

2011-05-13T16:33:00.000-06:00

(Cross-posted from Belmont Club, The Ten Thousand)

The Age of the Blogger has certainly transformed the way a lot of us work, and think, and relate. It has been an impressive movement in modern history that has brought us many good feelings, many moments of success. Heck, bloggers have even changed the world. In the ramifying ranks of the blogosphere there were roads to travel and lessons to learn; but perhaps the last lesson of that Age is now beginning to take shape before our eyes: namely, that it was just age, a temporary way of “being in the moment” that came, but came to pass.

For the Internet Age involved a lot more than just the spreading of new technology. It was also a fashion and a social phenomenon. Not a passing phase which is here today and gone tomorrow, but one of those deep transformations which lends its color and shape to an entire generation. Nevertheless, those movements, too, are transitory. Of flappers and bobbysoxers there are now none to be found; greasers and socs rumble no more. Even the mighty hippies, whose sheer mass once warped the social space about them like a tie-dyed shirt, have largely slipped into memory. Here and there one meets with a few bedraggled specimens who’ve outstayed their day and now linger on as living museum pieces; but the real substance of the movement, the spirit of the age, is gone.

So it will be too with the Blogger. Does not the very word sound timeful—a bit of slang destined to break the surface for a season before slipping through the nets of language, coming to rest on the sandy bottom with other pieces of perished time? Certainly we can expect that the internet itself will continue to exist in one form or another; and as long as it exists, there will always be people who write upon it. But it will not always be “cool” to do so. Bloggers will not forever grasp the levers that move the world. It may very well become a reliable, plodding profession like accountancy: predictably gainful, predictably dull. Then the masses of casual bloggers will exit the scene, and the aspect of the internet will be forever altered. We cannot see exactly what sort of world we’ll be left with when that happens, but it may perhaps be helpful to bear a couple of things in mind.

1. Computing, coding, writing—it’s not for everybody. It never should have been made to be about everybody. When computers went from the bus-sized difference engines of the past to the palm-sized smart phones of today, and graphic interfaces took the place of punch-cards, the skill level necessary to operate a computer plummeted while its value as a consumer status symbol rocketed skyward. This allowed great waves of people who possessed no fundamental understanding of how computers worked, to use them to perform all sorts of mundane tasks, like publish blogs. The idea may sound strange in our ears, but we must entertain the possibility that this metastable situation will not always obtain. More importantly, however, is the fact that writing has always been the province of the very few. At any given time, the number of people in the world who make their livings as professional writers amounts to no more than a relative handful. The popularity of blogs has not changed this essential fact; it has only obscured it by distorting the underlying culture.

I think of it like this: In 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary became the first person (that we know of) to ascend to the summit of Mount Everest. It was indeed a noteworthy accomplishment, but it was not intrinsically rare. Indeed, the sheer multitude of climbers who have stormed the summit of Everest since that date leads us to believe that the mere ability to climb Everest is somewhat broadly distributed throughout the human population, especially if they train hard for it and spend a lot of money on gear. So why do we celebrate Hillary for doing something that so many others could do, even if he was the first?

I think the answer (at least in part) is because Hillary had that rare kind of life which afforded him the opportunity not only to climb mountains, but to keep his honor at the same time. Anybody can do whatever they want, but very few can do what they want with honor. Most of us could only devote the time and money necessary to climb the Himalayas if we neglected other duties which were more important. Would the world celebrate us for that? Should the world celebrate us for that? I don’t think so. That’s why we don’t bother trying.

The same thing holds in other areas of celebrity accomplishment. I think there are a lot of people who could have played in the NFL, but few whose circumstances allowed them to devote all of their time to football. There are a lot of people who might have been concert pianists, but not many whose parents spent thousands of dollars on music teachers and made them practice 14 hours a day. Similarly, the artificial publishing ease created by the blogosphere removed all barriers that held back the would-be writer. When the internet made writing accessible to all, many people showed that they could do it, but it never really became a part of who they were. It was a hothouse atmosphere that spawned many a prize orchid, but for most it was only a temporary dream come true. Rare is the man who is destined to write; rare is he for whom it becomes his real calling and his real work, in rain or in shine, in sickness or in health. Writing is a very unusual business and few there are who are born to it.

2. We must realize that we can’t get something for nothing; or what amounts to the same thing, that we will only get what we pay for. The few outstanding bloggers out there have accustomed us to getting great news and analysis for free, but that is almost certainly short-lived. If we want to get really really good news, good essays, and good editorializing (on a regular basis, that is), then we must be prepared to pay. We can’t depend on internet cavaliers to always do the legwork for us at their own expense. Many bloggers have put forth excellent material while getting SFA for their efforts; but they have families and mortgages like everybody else, and how long do you think they can keep that up?

When blogging goes out of fashion and into arrears, then we’ll see how much we really want it and need it. Then we’ll see who and what we’re willing to pay for. The “wild West” phase of any activity cannot last forever. Eventually it must weave itself into the fabric of normal life or it must be abandoned. Perhaps what we’re seeing here is the beginning of the first large-scale readjustment.

With Osama Dead, a 9/11 Memoir

2011-05-05T21:40:00.003-06:00

I wish I could do my fellow Americans the courtesy of rejoicing with them over the news that, at long last—and nearly 10 years after perpetrating the terrorist attacks that made him the most wanted man on earth—Osama Bin Laden is now well and truly dead. But I’m having difficulty working up the necessary emotions, and I’m far too exhausted to go around faking it anymore. It’s not that the news isn’t good, it’s just that it no longer seems to pertain to me. The cares of 9/11 and all the reactions that followed in its wake belong to a world that I departed from a long time ago. I cannot get close to that world or feel myself to be a living member of it ever again. I can only watch it as through a pane of glass, and make such observations as seem to me supported by the facts. My personal history differs from the greater mass of men; a wrenching private struggle that I did not choose stamped me with a different set of priorities at the time when others were experiencing the horrors of 9/11. As a result, an unbridgeable chasm has grown between me and the larger world, a distance that only seems to broaden and harden with the passing years. It was already very great when that fateful Tuesday morning dawned hot and clear, those many years ago.

What follows is my 9/11 story. Perhaps it is not the most dramatic or the most profound, but it does seem to bear upon the events in a nontrivial way—a way that may find an echo in the experience of others. In any case, it is personal, it is truthful, and it is mine. I hope it will be of some value, for it is the only tale I have to tell.

“Do you remember where you were when the first plane hit?,” goes the question that will ever be asked of the generations who were alive on 09/11/2001. Indeed we are never supposed to forget it, and indeed I never have. I was on a city bus, just east of 92nd and Sheridan, in Westminster, Colorado. I overheard the bus driver mumbling something to one of his regulars, seated just behind him. “A plane crashed into the World Trade Center,” he said. “They think it’s an accident. But now 30 floors of the World Trade Center are on fire.” Thus the day’s news began to trickle in.

I recall that I felt an immediate increase in my general level of bemusement; for in those days, dear reader, I walked around in a cloud of bemusement thick enough to chew. Please forgive me if I say that I felt no pain, or at least not any additional pain. I already had all the pain I could stand, and at that point in time we still had no idea what was really going on.

I was 20 years old at the time, and it’s safe to say that my life had never been worse. Not that it had ever been much good to begin with. The neighborhood I grew up in was poor and blighted; my family had been the very picture of alcoholism, physical abuse, and dysfunction. I spent my teenage years embroiled in drugs and vandalism, got into a few fights, and even dropped out of high school in my junior year. These events precipitated my first complete nervous breakdown—at the age of 16. Nevertheless (and by the grace of God), I somehow managed to avoid serious brushes with the law, and I was even able to return to school and graduate with my class. Having no other plans for my life, I allowed a friend of mine to talk me into applying at a fairly selective engineering college with him; and to my everlasting astonishment, I was accepted. However, nothing in my previous life had taught me how to live independently in civil society, and going off to college was too much of a culture shock for me. While I had always been academically talented, I lacked the moral and character virtues necessary to thrive in my new surroundings. My behavior in college is best left unmentioned, and let us just say that I returned home shortly thereafter, with less glory than shame.

That’s when things really fell apart. My parents divorced, their drinking accelerated, my father became suicidal, and my mother took up with a much younger dirt-bag and moved him into the house. I wasn’t about to stand for that, but I had few legitimate means of recourse. After several months of intolerable tension and infighting, I found myself kicked out of my home (hauled away by police actually, at my mother’s behest), temporarily confined to a locked mental ward (I had committed no crime, but the police felt it necessary to dispose of me somehow—I shudder to recall the complete annihilation of civil rights and personhood that I experienced then), and unemployed and broke. I oscillated between wandering the streets and crashing at my father’s apartment, to which I returned mainly to cook for him and to make sure he was still alive. He tried to kill himself at least three times during that period, and twice he tried to kill me. I struggled to make ends meet by working day labor at a construction site, and thereafter by troubleshooting for Verizon customers at a call center. I did not starve, but there were times when I was grateful to be able to buy a box of cereal.

I eventually landed a slightly better job at a department store, and I got myself back into university, majoring in philosophy this time. As a fulltime student, with a fulltime job and no car, I spent several hours each day on the bus. That’s where I found myself when the planes began to hit, and that’s why I had but little sympathy to spare on the occasion. I was in a daze, dear reader. My personal 9/11 had begun long before.

That miserable life of mine dragged on and on. I will not assail you with all the details; I will only say that the sadness and anxiety I then experienced pushed me to the ragged edges of endurance, and sometimes beyond them. I cried in my sleep, which was a scant four hours a night. I felt a nameless and hitherto unknown fear in my dreams. It was the fear of waking up, the fear of having to “put on” consciousness once again like an iron maiden. If you have never been chronically depressed, dear reader, I shall describe the sensation for you. It is a hyperawareness that never dissipates. It is rather like being rudely awakened from a deep sleep as though by a drill sergeant, banging trashcan lids and shining a flashlight in your face. In fact, the pain of bright sunlight on eyes used to deep darkness is exactly like the pain of despondency, only it does not fade with adjustment. It becomes a permanent feature of your waking existence. It is like a hot knife in your mind; it is like the shame of public nakedness; it is like falling through swirling black clouds with no solid surface to fall upon. You are driven to strain every nerve in search of a solution, although you have no idea where a solution might be found.

I was weak and humiliated. I was nothing in the face of the world. I felt as vulnerable and helpless as a pinkie mouse, a tasty morsel for some dread creature that had fared better in the fortunes of life. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that I read philosophy obsessively. I had a taste for the modernists—especially Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Tillich—because I felt like I was recapitulating in my own being all the angst and despair of Western civilization. I developed a great love for Oswald Spengler, because I knew that the horrors metastasizing in my own life were but the side effects of a greater societal decay. I dabbled in Baudrillard and Foucault, because I sensed that the electronic media had long been weaving a cocoon of hyperreality about me which I would have to dismantle if I was ever to think clearly. This last consideration would be of immense importance later on.

It is a dangerous matter to lose everything you’ve ever known, dear reader. Such turnings have driven many men to their graves. It is only slightly less dangerous to take seriously the convolutions of modern philosophy; and using them, to attempt to rebuild one’s worldview at the most fundamental level of system architecture. To do both at the same time is sheer madness. It is to creep within the very shadow of Barad-dûr itself. Yet that is what I did. By the grace of God, I had passed through the ultimate anxiety and found a path through the Dead Marshes.

It is regrettable that I did not read Aristotle at that time, but of necessity I began to think after his manner. I needed something good and stable to stand upon, needed to know whether or not reality could be trusted. I’m not sure if very many people know what it’s like to have to do metaphysics—not just to study it, but to actually do it (yes, and epistemology too!)—as if your life depended on it. When you stop treating philosophy as a speculative exercise and demand from it bankable results, you inevitably become an Aristotelian. It was in those awful days that I first started believing in God because it was reasonable to do so. It was then that I started to discover, in my own rudimentary fashion, “ontological proofs” for God’s existence, and something resembling the Five Ways of St. Thomas Aquinas. Looking back on those times, I am rather proud of myself that I was able to reinvent so sublime and noble a wheel, and under such impossible circumstances to boot. But I am also somewhat upset that nobody had ever taught me these simple truths in the first place.

That was the beginning of my regeneration. I had much to suffer yet, and I have much to suffer still. I will not bore you, dear reader, with the details of my escape from the Dark Tower of modernism, my eventual conversion to the Roman Catholic faith, or with any of my present labors. It remains for me now to talk about how these experiences shaped my interpretation of 9/11, and the subsequent US reaction.

(It’s a story about 9/11 after all, so let’s get back to the point.)

Forsooth, it was some time yet before I had attained the peace of mind necessary to pay attention to external events. When I began to do so again, I found a world very differently constituted from the one that I had left behind. Consider: I had watched virtually no television for the previous three and a half years. In the meantime, “Reality TV” had become a hit phenomenon, the tech-stocks bubble had broken and burst, and nevertheless a sort of internet-savvy chicness, a pink-shirt-and-Starbucking insouciance, had become de rigueur in middleclass circles. I was not online; I didn’t even own a computer. Cultural events of the highest magnitude had passed me by unawares. I had missed Super Bowls, hit television series, the advent of Britney Spears and the boy bands, the collapse of Enron—even the Millennium itself barely registers in my memory. I found that I did not care. I had broken with the world and moved on. I lost all taste for television and never again could I stay absorbed in a mere “show.” Furthermore, I had grown up somewhat. My trials had taught me something about human psychology, and about the dark motives and deceptions that seethe in the hearts of men. Finally, my natural skepticism and my encounters with Baudrillard had taught me to deconstruct the hyperreality of the electronic media. Unwilling to get burned by the world a second time, I wanted to perceive only the reality behind all impressions and dissimulations. So there I stood, bending my mind this way and that—scrutinizing, exacting, demanding—unearthing motives and plots, reading the telltale traces of all the edits and retcons and bluffs with which men inevitably polish their accounts. Such was the mindset I brought to bear on the news when I started watching the War on Terror unfold. It was just about this time that Secretary Colin Powell gave his famous report to the United Nations.

I wasn’t all that impressed. It’s not that I didn’t believe him, it’s just that I didn’t understand what the big deal was supposed to be. A couple of white rectangles on a satellite photo which might have been trailers; trailers which might have been mobile weapons laboratories—was that it? And what did Saddam Hussein have to do with 9/11 anyway? The report was pretty underwhelming just where I demanded to be blown away. Having developed the cautious habit of overestimating the competence of authority, I was expecting the high brass to present something like a Tom Clancy novel come to life. The tiresome lecture given by Powell didn’t satisfy my desire for certainty. This initial disappointment already left me with the feeling that something was very wrong.

That feeling was confirmed by my second, much greater disappointment. It was deeply unsettling to watch the entire news media suddenly effloresce with a number of quite improbable hawks. I found the jingoistic tone at FOX News—that prim, Protestant, from-the-heartland sort of cant which is so characteristic of their reportage—to be both artificial and unwatchable. I remember when the idea of “embedded journalists” was first mooted, and my distress when such an obvious propaganda tactic did not meet with the vociferous objections it deserved. I remember reading Michael Kelly’s editorial, “Making the Moral Case for War in Iraq;” and I remember, a few weeks later, when Michael Kelly became the first embedded Iraqi war journalist to die in his emdeddedness. But most of all, I remember the massive spectator enthusiasm that the media engendered for this war, the ribbons and lapel pins and terror alerts and stupid anthems, the Cult of First Responder Worship which sprang up at about this time (my recent experience of getting railroaded into the psych ward left me none too well-disposed towards the cops), and how people who one month ago couldn’t tell you the difference between a Howitzer and Mauser rifle would now gladly inform you that the battle wagon you saw on the TV screen was a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and not, ahem, an Armored Personnel Carrier.

I couldn’t escape the impression that the whole thing was turning into a circus, but I was still willing to put up with all the media shenanigans on the theory that it was within the range of normal behavior for a people who suddenly had had war foisted upon them. However, once President Bush told me that I needed to help America in its hour of need by going shopping, I was done being generous—the romance was over for me. No longer could I maintain the belief that the captains running this war had any sense of the gravity of their actions. I remained a stalwart Republican of course, a two-time Bush voter and a (blech!) one-time McCain voter; but from that moment on, I was never quite on board with the Administration. Unlike the rabble-rousers on the Left, I always sustained that there was nothing particularly immoral or underhanded about our invasion of Iraq; however, I opposed the invasion on the rather quotidian paleoconservative grounds that it was being managed by idiots, that the objectives were unclear, that the probable benefits were slim to none, and at any rate it was much too expensive. This was the most commonsense position one could hold at the time, which is probably why it was shared by practically nobody.

That the war was largely a media creation none can now doubt. This is true for the obvious reason that relatively few American lives were directly impacted by it. If you were one of the 290 million Americans who were not in New York or Washington on September 11th, if your friends and relations made it through the day unharmed, and if you are not one of the several hundred thousand servicemen who have seen duty in Iraq or Afghanistan (or one of their kin), then your experience of the War on Terror has been something brought to you entirely via TV, news, and internet. Whether your personal opinion inclines toward supporting or opposing the war effort, it matters not; for in what meaningful sense can you support or oppose something that you have nothing to do with? The conclusion is that, for most Americans, the war nearly could have been forgotten (and would have been), were it not for the media’s constant reporting on it, and the manner in which it figured into the domestic policy debate. Important implications follow.

Let us take, for instance, the 9-11 “Truther” movement, execrable insult to good taste that it is. It was late in the year of 2004 when I first heard of them—on CSPAN of all places. I think I must have been flipping through television channels when I saw something that looked like an erudite policy debate. Since I happen to enjoy erudite policy debates, I tuned in for awhile. As it so happens, I caught maybe the last 10 minutes of what turned out to be some sort of blue ribbon Truther panel made up of engineers, professors, and other assorted wonks. Up until that time, it had never even crossed my mind to doubt the accepted version of the September 11th events. I’ll admit that I was intrigued, so I looked into the matter and thought about it carefully. However, I quickly decided that the entire Truther premise was ridiculous. It was so ridiculous, in fact, that one could not long hold to it without compromising one’s common sense. Why were so many “experts” in the natural sciences so willing to lend their names to something which quite clearly insisted upon the bastardization of their respective disciplines? I discounted the fringe benefits that would come from such a move, such as garnering instant popularity among a certain segment of the Left. It had to be some sort of higher-level game they were playing, or perhaps some deep psychological need that drove them onward.

Thus we come, dear reader, to the greatest catastrophe of them all: the general disengagement from reality which has marked this war from the beginning on both sides of the political spectrum. How could it be that tens of millions of Americans had already assumed that the US government was somehow responsible for the 9/11 attacks, scarcely before the dust from the collapsing towers had cleared? How could it be that such carnage, so obviously inflicted by a foreign enemy, could so rapidly be subtilized into a paranoid accusation flung at the heads of the reigning administration? Could it be because, deep down, we all knew that the attack was no more than a fleabite, and that it wasn’t going to make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things? Didn’t we sense (oh, the heresy it would have been to admit it!) that a great battle had been joined, only it wasn’t the Global War on Terror (which merely occupied the visible wavelengths)? It was the battle for political capital on the domestic scene: that was the real object of desire. America the Hegemon herself was on the table, and the victor would control her destiny. In other words, the immediate effects of the 9/11 attacks were of so little consequence that, as soon as everybody had caught their breath, they each begin to think of how to turn the situation to their advantage; and the prize they fought for was the possession of America, the only real prize left in the world.

This will be easier to see if we examine first the case of the Truthers, and analyze their processes of belief formation. Such an analysis (admittedly barebones), would go something like this: There are many people in this country who naturally suspect the government of every sort of foul and malicious behavior. The exact etiology of these beliefs is something which we cannot go into in great detail about here, but let us just say that there is nothing especially abnormal or defective about such people. They have normal human aspirations, unfortunately cathected to the wrong objects. The basic explanation is that their beliefs feel good to them, and provide them with a narrative structure and sense of control over their lives. The essence of this sense of control is freedom from responsibility. Consequently, these people have a very ambiguous relationship with authority, since authority is the embodiment of responsibility. They hate submitting to it always, they will seize it for themselves when they can, and they will wield it arbitrarily when they have it. All ordinary symbols of authority, particularly the Church and the State, become their hated adversaries. The more they hate authority, the greater becomes their sense of power, and the more eager they are to appropriate authority and twist it to their own designs. They are the quintessential liberals and revolutionaries.

You will inevitably find such people gravitating toward progressivist causes, all progressivist causes, whether they involve ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, class structure, environmentalism, or what have you. They may be under the impression that they actually believe in such causes, but in reality they are simply drawn instinctively toward any political movement calculated to oppose the ordinary power structure. The numerous contradictions in their belief system do not bother them, for it is not truth they are interested in. The secret logic of power knits together all their multitudinous designs. The 9/11 attacks provided them with an opportunity which was too good to lose, from their point of view. For them, it was just as if an oil tanker had broken up on a reef, which event they would have used to pillory Big Oil; or as if a child had died of secondhand smoke inhalation, which they would have used to pillory Big Tobacco. As it so happens, the Ordinary Authority dropped the ball on 9/11, so they used that event to pillory Big Government. An observation of failure quickly became an imputation of incompetence, which became neglect, which became complicity, which became malice. With these key psychological elements in place, there wasn’t much work left to do. The rest of the 9/11 Truther narrative is just literature, just as Marxism and Gender Studies are no more than literature at bottom, unreal in their very marrow. The only thing that matters is the power structures which such literature takes for granted, the power structures that can unite a mass of humanity in a common revolutionary purpose. These books know their own, and their own know them. There you have the anatomy of a Truther.

But we must admit that the Truther movement derived a lot of its impetus from the failure of Ordinary Authority to handle the situation properly. The Neocons, too, had their dreams and their visions, and they were no less opportunistic than the Libs when it came to converting 9/11 into the MacGuffin for the rather bizarre screenplay that followed. The trailer for that movie would have gone something like this: Imagine a realm of marvelous technological wonder and achievement, where Kantian Republics bloom in what once was hostile desert. Where a law called the Bush Doctrine brought peace to a troubled planet, and men from every corner of the earth raised purple fingers skyward in pledges of endless brotherhood. On the day when the towers fell, a nation arose from its slumber; a nation that would become a religion, a religion that would transform a universe!

Such is a peek into the mindset of our Neocon brethren, who with Francis Fukuyama and Leo Strauss were already contemplating the End of History when the smoke alarms started going off in the Pentagon. “This calls for an end of history,” they said; and they found in themselves men admirably suited to play the role of the Ender. Some time they had had to look forward to this, and they had not been idle. Thus it was that they were able to roll out the PATRIOT Act in no time at all, and the preparations were already in place for the invasion of at least two countries. The Department of Homeland Security they established, ostensibly for securing the homeland; and the TSA they did also establish, to secure everybody’s underpants. Flag pins they wore on their swollen chests, and duct tape they gave for our windows. A coalition of think-tankers and hick balladeers was assembled to give the movement some much-needed cultural cachet; and the End of History, a World Federation under the auspices of American democracy, was ever twinkling in their eyes.

If you’ll forgive me for waxing lyrical, dear reader, what I’m trying to say is that the Neoconservative Establishment’s immediate response to the 9/11 attacks was not to bring the terrorists to justice as efficiently as possible, but to implement an orchestrated program of world-improvement for which 9/11 was simply the convenient excuse. To this end they massively expanded the federal bureaucracy, spinning off new departments and offices at a breakneck pace. They appropriated to themselves new powers to surveil and detain the civilian population. And when it came time to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, to the military objectives of the campaigns was added the program of “nation building,” the deliberate attempt to remake the cultural aspect of whole regions of the globe. It was a farfetched notion at best: the sort of “Teach the savages to speak Americano”-type idealism that one often associates with tired colonial powers whose leading men have gone soft in the guts. Not only was this spectacle draining to watch, but it placed in an awkward position those of us who thought that America’s defense was still worth fighting for, and who felt obliged to defend the Administration’s prerogatives on that account.

So we see that while the Truthers and the Neocons opposed each other in rhetoric, in style and in substance they were really quite similar. They each had a dream they were trying to sell, and within that dream was cloaked the desire to control America’s future. They each offered up some rather flimsy justifications for the changes they were wont to inflict on American life; and they each showed, by the bungle which they made of affairs when the desired power fell at last into their hands, that a true grasp of the situation eluded their comprehension, and exceeded their capacities. The Neocons, be it said, were much closer to the truth, while the ironically-named Truthers were far away from it. But the tactics employed by the Neocons opened up a chance for the Truthers to play their gambit. If there were ever any solid and believable reasons for expanding the government and invading Iraq, the Neocons never presented them. What they offered instead was a sentiment, and the Truthers’ sure instinct for power sensed that behind that sentiment lay a bid for domestic supremacy. The Truthers, not to be outdone, countered with an alternative version of reality, saying, in effect, “You have your sentiments, and we have ours.” While the Neocons had some inkling of the truth, they never justified it: They offered unjustified true beliefs. The Truthers responded with unjustified false beliefs. And if the Neocons openly accused the Truthers of having ulterior motives, the Truthers would just stare back at them across the table, knowing that the Establishment had ulterior motives of its own, and that they would never willingly throw down their own cards. Thus was a situation created which was tailor-made to prevent any facts from coming to light. The War on Terror became kabuki theater in the battle for domestic sentiments. For where there are no facts, dear reader, sentiment rules.

And so the long middle years of the Iraqi invasion rolled on…2004…2005…2006. These were the years when the news media really came into its own as the decisive factor in shaping the national mood. It was an era of exposé books and hit pieces in the major periodicals (think Fiasco and Seymour Hersh). It was the setting for a fierce, protracted duel between Keith Olbermann and Bill O’Reilly, and the networks they represented. And above all it was the Age of the Blogger, the advent of the independent world-improver. For now a new contender appeared in the lists of battle to add to the confusion and the noise. Across the crackling channels of cyberspace there arose a mighty din, an endless stream of commentary and criticism which inflated the 24-hour news cycle to thunderhead proportions. Long had this mass been kept silent. Before the internet came, they had lain in smoldering resentment; for, unable to breech the corridors of official publication, they had had to content themselves with firing off the occasional letter to the editor. But now, empowered by easy access to data and at least a theoretical audience, they woke up and felt that they were strong. Wielding Excel charts and Google Earth pics, they charged into the fray with all the gusto of their long-repressed emotion. And for once, high up in their unassailable battlements, the powers of the mainstream media were shaken. Pressing, clamoring, and inexorable, the Peanut Gallery was on the march.

I’ll admit that I was seduced, dear reader. There was so much going on in this Brave New World that I, too, wanted to be a part of it. Persons who had hitherto labored in obscurity were out there making names for themselves, and I thought, “Why not me?” After all I had read a little history and philosophy, and I had thought long and hard about these subjects. I could turn a phrase reasonably well when the proper mood struck me, and in the past my essays had met with some attention in some not too inconsiderable venues. I began to think I had a future in policy analysis. I wanted to make some meaningful contribution to society and thereby resurrect my life from the doldrums to which fate had consigned it; I wanted to be where the action was; and above all, I wanted to exercise my dearly-bought Baudrillardian skepticism and get to the bottom of things. Surely there would be an appetite for that?

So when the Great Host of the Peanut Gallery (shall we call them the Pea-orns?) went marching by, I eventually joined with the assembly. But I needed more information, needed to stay abreast of things, so it was unavoidable that I started watching the news again. This I did with an enthusiasm fit to balance the scales against my previous media fast. Every day I tracked the financial markets, meditating deeply on the foreign exchange rates and the spot price of commodities (though I don’t have a penny invested in anything). The foreign news, too, I watched, Deutsche Welle and the BBC. I stayed glued to CNN, MSNBC, and even to Charlie Rose (an interruptive blabbermouth he is, but he seems to get all the good guests). And I worked over everything I saw with the highest degree of philosophical exactitude I could muster.

I tell you this because I am now slightly chagrined by it. When I look back at my writings from that period, I am heartened by my occasional flashes of brilliance; but I am also unnerved by the overwrought thinkiness of it all: World-historical implications attributed to events of transitory significance, a trifling federal interest rate fluctuation parsed in Heideggerian terminology—and all of it couched in a tone that not infrequently exhibited signs of an underlying mental disturbance. I suppose I could be forgiven for that, though. I was effectively fatherless; I had no real life and no prospects; I was desperate for recognition and very insecure about ever being taken seriously, so I poured all my energy into every little post and comment. Needless to say, I took disagreement quite personally. I wanted to stand as a beacon in the storm, to acquire prudence and to become a man. In the end it appears that I was not entirely unsuccessful, although my success came in a manner that I never expected. For throughout the long middle years of the invasion, I could never repress the intuition that I was wasting my time “getting to the bottom of it.” Amid all the media smoke and noise, all the policy and theory and analysis that so delighted my intellect, I was missing out on what was really important. The key to understanding any war is not to be found in the annals of strategy and correspondence; it is found in knowing where you stand and what you are fighting for—and I didn’t. Home and hearth, family and friends, God and grace—those should have been my concerns. Although I greatly wished to be relevant to the times, all the events and decisions were taking place far beyond my reach (by design), and I had no means to influence them. By this time my impression of the War on Terror was one of pageantry repeated ad nauseum. The talking heads had chattered their teeth down to the nubs, and the trumpets had blared too long. I didn’t want another drink of this draught, thank you. I was getting queasy, and I was sobering up. It was time for me to go home, dear reader. I’d had enough.

Apparently the country, too, had had enough. The 2006 Congressional Elections swept into office a wave of Democrats, and nobody could have honestly said they were surprised by the result. The tide had turned, and the opposition was starting to win the battle for US sentiment. It is interesting to note that the sort of wedge issues which traditionally serve as a proxy for registering increases in liberal attitudes—the legalization of gay marriage, for instance—went down in ignominious defeat at the very moment when the party long associated with liberalism was garnering its biggest electoral victory in decades. But the American people were not voting for liberalism; they were voting for a return to normalcy. What transpired in the interim was, I think, a nation-sized version of my personal transmigration from initial enthusiasm to toleration to disgust. For by now it had dawned, even among those directly engaged in fighting the war, that the matter had become solipsistic, completely captured by the exigencies of domestic party politics. The American people felt like they were not being heard, and they were tired of needlessly shedding blood and treasure on a campaign for which they were offered no clear exit strategy, but every convenient excuse. What’s more, the time had long expired when the average person could see how his contributions to the war effort were making any difference. Under such circumstances, it was inevitable that support for the endeavor waned. And it will not do to say, as so many Neocons at the time were wont to say, that the only reason why so many unpatriotic Americans were able to criticize the war effort in peace and comfort, was because valiant men were defending them on distant fields of battle, spilling their blood for the country that they (at least) still loved, un-thanked and unappreciated. The truth is only a few cranks ever dared to disparage the efforts of our soldiers. Indeed not since World War II had American servicemen been lauded with so much genuine fanfare. It was the American people who were unappreciated, dismissed, and lied to. It was they who had seen their freedoms confiscated and their national deficits balloon. And it was then, in the long middle years, that the realization set in, grim and irrevocable, that the American people were just an object, a source of votes and revenues for the bureaucratic coterie in Washington, who managed the affairs of the world with an eye toward their own preservation, and took but little notice of the restiveness brooding throughout the land. So it came to pass that in November of 2006, the American people, without much ado, and admirable in their restraint, turned up in astonishing numbers for a midterm election, and voted to go home.

Finally, it was no coincidence that the long middle years saw attention to the Iraqi campaign increase out of all proportion to its importance in the actual War on Terror, at least as far as the domestic policy battle was concerned. Iraq: the word will forever remain synonymous with the War on Terror, even though the only proper theater of combat, if combat there must be, was arguably in Afghanistan. Thus it was that Iraq became the real bone of contention in the ideological conflict which ensued, the target of the most blistering criticisms as well as the object of the most pompous defenses. Depending on the ferocity of the particular attacker, the Administration’s motives for embarking on the Iraqi campaign were adjudged to be either imprudent or base; and these attacks naturally elicited rebuttals from the Establishment which sounded more like obfuscatory rhetoric than reasoned explanations. The acrimony that was engendered by this is what drove the entire debate, and much that should have been done or explained was left to fall through the cracks. It was only rarely, and almost as an afterthought to the intense media focus on the Iraqi theater, that somebody would moot the fatal question, “Hey, whatever happened to that Bin Laden guy?” Perhaps that was why many of us just assumed he was already dead.

Looking back, it is easy to see how the Tide of 2006 adumbrated the political reversals of 2008; and here we must pay heed to something we overlook only at our peril. The Republican Establishment bears the blame for the sole American defeat ever suffered in the War on Terror: the election of Barack Hussein Obama, the greatest “man caused disaster” ever to befall the country, greater by far than 9/11 itself. I said openly at the time that it was “love” that caused his election; but it wasn’t the love of him, still less the love of the liberal policies he represented. It was love for the America we once knew, love of home and peace and normalcy. The Republicans, with their endless prevarications, their bluster and bravado and ham-fisted insouciance, had practically assured the election of a Democrat in 2008; and beyond that, they assured the primary election of the most liberal, most exotic, most machine-oiled Democrat the country could find. Here we are left to ponder the irony of the fact that a man whose mindset stands closer to America’s enemies than to America’s, had the fortune to be leading the country on the day when America’s War on Terror finally swept to its conclusion.

So it was that on Sunday, May 1st, in the year 2011, the third in the reign of King Hussein I, the country rejoiced to learn that Osama Bin Laden had been found and destroyed. Almost immediately, though, there was cause for misgiving. The initial reports were much varied and contradictory; the body was ceremoniously dumped in an unknown sea; and after some initial waffling, we were informed that no pictures of the corpse would ever be made public. “Don’t you worry,” our government reassured us. “We have the DNA evidence. We got him.” Yet many people have remained stubbornly un-reassured. I’ll admit that I, too, succumbed to some temporary Obama Derangement Syndrome. After all, he certainly doesn’t deserve to go down in history as the president who felled America’s Most Wanted. From what we know about his character, we cannot put it past him to lie about such an event, or at least to distort the facts beyond recognition in order to enhance his own popularity. But whatever the true events were, it appears to me upon reflection that at least the kernel of the story must be accepted as fact. Bin Laden was either killed last week or he was already dead. I doubt very much that he is still alive.

One thing, though, I do not doubt: the American people deserve better than this. Here at the conclusion of this long and nasty conflict, we deserve better than an Obama photo-op and a breezy assertation that all is well, and never mind the lack of evidence. Haven’t we had enough of that attitude already? Isn’t this, in fact, more of the very same attitude that needlessly prolonged this war, and caused so much heartsickness and division here at home? It is good that Osama Bin Laden is dead, but it did not need to take 10 years. It did not need to come at the cost of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives. It did not need to involve such draconian changes to American society as we have had to endure. And it did not require us to sell out to the Pakistanis, as so many marginalized voices long warned us we were doing. Let us take stock of all that has transpired since 9/11, and ask what changes we can now demand of our government, now that the man who started it all has finally met his demise. Don’t we now have a good enough reason for pulling out of Afghanistan? I think we have at minimum a good enough reason for getting rid of the TSA. Surely we can expect some of these changes to take place. If they do not, it is proof that the war was never about Bin Laden. It was always about domestic policy, about Washington and who would control its wealth-absorbing power; and that is a pretty sad commentary on the state of affairs. I think, after all is said and done, that the American people are at least entitled to closure. Closure and freedom.

So you see, dear reader, for me this war has ended pretty much as it began, in a collage of media reports that cannot be absorbed or assimilated, in an overweening government that permits no one to peer into its mysterious doings. And if I may be permitted to append a personal request at the conclusion of this overlong remembrance, let it be a request that all Americans now strive to retake the freedom and dignity which we let slip away in the terror of darker days. Let not Bin Laden’s legacy be an America sickened and spavined and reduced to groveling at the table of nations, but stronger, freer, and self-reliant. Let all those things that once were good and cherished, be so again. And if war should ever menace our shores anew, let us not forget who we are, and what we’re fighting for.

The long war is over, my brothers. Let’s go home.

Obama's next move: The LaDouchebag Organization (from Belmont Club)

2011-04-28T23:31:00.002-06:00

(Cross-posted from "Born to be Mild")

It brings me no joy to say it, but I had the same thoughts about a month ago regarding Obama’s propensity for “leading from behind.” Writing on another Belmont Club post, I expressed similar thoughts about Obama’s leadership style, especialy in this paragraph:

1) The Obama Administration, despite the distance which Obama tried to put between his own position and the Bush Doctrine in last night’s speech, has succeeded not only in recapitulating that doctrine but even in magnifying its errors. Where Bush refused to try Saddam himself, Obama refuses even to fight Khadaffi himself. Where Bush handed Saddam over to his rebellious factions to be hung, Obama hands Khadaffi’s rebellious factions the rope. Where Bush led a loose but internationally recognized coalition of the willing, Obama trails an internationally tendentious consortium of the desperate. And while the Left in this country bemoaned Bush’s lack of an exit strategy, when it came their turn to fight they fecklessly refused to propound even an entrance strategy. The actions of the present Administration evince no clear goal beyond justifying the President’s existence in the White House.

Having gone right on the previous assessment, I shall now venture another. Again, it brings me no joy to say it, and I wish I had some better news to foretell; but for better or for worse, here is what my searching mind tells me.

With his foreign policy being shown to be a failure and a worsening economic situation at home, one last offensive will yet issue forth from the Obama administration in time to kick off the 2012 campaign season in earnest. What the specifics of this initiative will be cannot yet be told, but its broad outlines are easy enough to guess: Obama will call for a populist uprising.

In terms of its scope and extraconstitutionality, it will effectively be “Obamacare 2.0″ , but its content will be very different. We can expect it to display a marked emphasis on environmentalism, especially with regard to mandating carbon reduction and efficiency (read: austerity) measures. We can expect it to involve a youth volunteer corps of immense proportions, which will simultaneously serve as a sort of para-political farm team and psi-ops apparatus, with a strong personal loyalty to Obama (i.e. something like a cross between the SS and the LaRouche organization, but fashioned for the final implemetation of ’60s radicalism). We can expect it to be managed through social networking sites and largely outside the channels of the official bureaucracy. And finally, we can expect it to be a spoils system that will previde educational funding and academic posts only to those with the preferred ideological makeup.

Since all of this will be done unofficially and voluntarily—”in the spirit of the times,” you might say—these legions will answer only to Obama’s personal charism. Being thus formless and unaccountable, they will be all the more dangerous. Obama will empower them with his presence, will empower every Leftist huckster and race-card dealer and community organizer in the land, and they will feel their oats, and will rise up and demand change. But Obama will have to be ever before them, on the Youtube channels and social media, doing his song and dance. He will appear ridiculous to serious folk, but it will matter no longer; for this is his last best shot.

In short, his ability for real political leadership in tatters, Obama will go into full-blown Ceaușescu mode, nightly marionette dances and all. He will drum an army of willing Leftists out of the soil to serve as his great host. For this next battle we must now prepare.

The problem is with democracy, not with the birth certificate (from Belmont Club)

2011-04-27T16:49:00.002-06:00

It is difficult for me to make such comments as must be made [about the revelation of Barack Obama's birth certificate] without sounding A) off-topic and B) reactionary; but since Wretchard quite properly brought up the subject of trust, all indications point to the fact that this discussion has now “gone meta,” to use the au courant terminology. We are no longer really talking about the birth certificate itself, but about the ontological wellsprings of power and the highly symbolic act of vesting authority.

Here is the situation as I see it. What sort of man Barack Obama is should have been obvious from the very beginning. It is revealed in his character, his actions, his speech, his physiognomy, his relations, and in all the other modes which we typically use to “size up” a person. Prudent people knew from their first glimpse of him that he was a dangerous manipulator, and that was enough to determine them against his candidacy. Since the danger rests in who he is not where he was born, there was no need to wait for a resolution to the birther controversy. The content of his character, as per MLK’s famous dream, had already disqualified him in the minds of the sober.

The angst of the birthers (I hate the unfortunate term—I am using it only for brevity’s sake) therefore cannot reasonably be attributed to a simple concern about the constitutionality of his election. In seems to stem instead from something like the following reasoning: “Barack Obama is just the sort of man who could mesmerize large numbers of the young, the unwary, the foolish, and the wicked; besides which, he has the entire PC, race-baiting, transnational Marxist machinery at his beck and call. We know exactly what he will do if in power, and the vision is horrible to contemplate; yet a crooked fate makes us look like the bad guys if we say so openly. Such conundrums are the inevitable crosses of trying to live like true conservatives in the modern world. Therefore it is necessary to expose him by some innocuous method. He has given us reasonable grounds to suppose that he does not meet the constitutional criteria to be elected president, and his character suggests that a lie on this score is not altogether out of the question. Let us press the point!” Of course, I am not suggesting that these words accurately reflect anybody’s conscious deliberations on the matter. Rather, this is what the birthers’ prudential decision-making would look like if it were translated into prose.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and submit that it may have been the wrong decision to make. The constitutionality of Obama’s election is not really as important as they’ve made it out to be. “Aha,” they might say, “You don’t think it is important that we might have been able, on constitutional grounds, to block this destructive individual from ever wielding one iota of presidential power for the bane of America? And to expose his aspirations, and those of the entire Leftist movement of which he stands at the head, as an edifice built on lies and deceit?”

No, I don’t. For everybody already knows such things about the Left, and the Left goes on anyway. In this particular case it might have made a difference, to the disgrace of one lone individual; but the Left is full of disgraced individuals, and the Left goes on anyway (as often as not, the disgraced individuals, too, go on anyway).

The crucial point was raised above, when we described Obama as “just the sort of man.” The sort of man to do what, exactly? Well, the sort of man that the preexisting Leftist machinery could use for its old familiar purposes. You see, Barack Obama is a type of Nazgûl, a creature hollow and fell. What he is in his own nature doesn’t matter so much. He wanted power and was ensnared by it long ago. Everything he is, and everything he does, can be referred to his principal, the Dark Lord whom he serves.

The real problem is not that a man like Obama became president, with or without a birth certificate (for the Leftist machinery could ever generate another candidate, and the defenestration of Barack Hussein Obama, even had we been able to arrange it, would not have done it any lasting harm). The problem is that we live in a world where creatures like Barack Obama are even thinkable in the first place. In order to be rid of them for good and all, we must destroy the One Ring from whence his power issues, the power of the Left itself, i.e. the power of modernity.

How did we end up with an Obama in charge? Certainly decades of Leftist agitprop and institutional reverse racism had something to do with it; but behind them lurks the darker spectre of democracy itself, that pernicious doctrine which holds that people who could not name the last five presidents should have a hand in choosing the next one. Yet the Overton Window slams shut on the tongue of anyone who dares suggest that democracy itself should be reevaluated, hence the difficulty and absurdity of being a conservative in the modern world. Apparently, even conservatives must hold to the maxim that the Enlightenment was just fine and dandy up until about 1920, or even 1933—it was only after that that things got out of hand. But as a matter of fact, politics in the Western world have not been “conservative” since at least 1789, and the adumbrations of that upheaval go back all the way to the 1650s.

Thus, I am not overly concerned about the constitutionality of Obama’s election. Being a Monarchist, I do not feel quite bound by the canons of the US Constitution anyway, since the document itself is irredeemably revolutionary. Whatever the means by which Obama rose to power, the fact that he rose to power is a verdict on the state of American democracy, and the verdict is one of rigor mortis. The task before us is to create by living example, and by the hard work of real-world politics (as opposed to the electoral variety), the kind of world in which just and free men can live in. We can only do that by recognizing that there can never be any rapprochement between freedom and modernity. The modern state is nothing but bureaucratic tyranny, be it in communist, socialist, or republican forms. Throughout human history there have been any number of tolerably contented subjects. There has never been a democracy that lasted much longer than two centuries. You do the math.

The comment that Catholic News Agency refuses to publish.

2011-04-26T09:52:00.002-06:00

You know, I'm getting pretty sick and tired of having my comments on other sites continuously trashed and deleted by some stick-up-the-ass moderator. Here is the latest deletion, which appeared beneath an article at Catholic News Agency, in which George Weigel (that idiot) saw fit to "slam" those who criticize Pope John Paul II's fast track to sainthood. Read the article first, then my comment below will make more sense.

===========================

Hey George,

The fact that JP2's papacy "changed the history of the Church and the world" is the very reason why he shouldn't be beatified. The changes were terrible. JP2 was a modernist catastrophe of a pope. In the realm of theology, it is clear that this man never thought like a Catholic. In the realm of practical affairs, he was utterly inept. Papal success? Please. Perhaps he can be the patron the saint of false ecumenism, of Koran kissing, of statues of Buddha on top of the tabernacle, of pedophilia, and of losing 50% of Mass attendance under his watch. Passing strange reasons to beatify anybody, still more on the "fast track."

The ex-drama student from Poland with his tremendous ego simply wanted to impress the Church with the marks of his own grasp. His entire papacy was one big graffiti scrawl saying, in effect, "Karol was here." His discarding of the Magisterial "we," the dithyrambic timbre of his papal writings, and his pernicious modernism pervading every aspect of his thought, his insufferable attempt to alter the Rosary, all testify that popularity was more important than orthodoxy to him. And let's not forget his constant jet-setting and glad-handing of crowds, his meetings with every pagan religion and heretical Protestant sect (it seems he met with everyone, everyone but the victims of sex abuse, that is). Well, excuse me, but I am not impressed by the spectacle of Pope Jean-Luc II flitting around the galaxy, implementing his ecumenical Prime Directive.

This has got to stop. Nobody is buying your whitewash anymore, George. And if, by the unsearchable mercy of God, Karol Woytyla is in Heaven at this moment, I pray him to somehow, some way, put a stop to this beatification, so that he will not continue to destroy the Church in death as he did in life.

Good day to you, sir.

The comment that National Catholic Register refuses to publish.

2011-03-31T16:43:00.001-06:00

Shame on them. But what did I expect?

In an article dicsussing the Fr. Corapi case, I have appended the following comment. It has not yet appeared on the site, and perhaps it never will. But it is true, and history will bear out the import of my words.
================
The dominoes continue to fall. Maciel, Euteneuer, now Corapi. So passes the Novus Ordo. So passes the legacy of John Paul the "Great." Robert Barron will be the next to go, followed shortly by Scott Hahn (who will not sin publicly, but will apostatize).

And while Mark Shea offers some rare words of sobriety on this occasion (certainly not his usual MO), he should know that the clock is ticking on him as well. In fact, any Novus Ordinarian with a public "media ministry" will shortly find the boom of the Almighty lowered on all his works, including the entirety of EWTN. Uncountable reams of material have been issued in the name of the Catholic Church by private individuals acting on their own initiative, or at most abetted by heretical bishops: thousands of hours of video and audio, books, blogs, articles, devotional tracts, diocesan rags, catechetical booklets -- none of it vetted by proper authorities, all of it juvenile and bereft of sound philosophy, all of it stinking of the Novus Ordo and the liberal sacrilege of Garrulous Karolus, all of it destined for the memory hole when the Church Militant recovers her senses.

When Pope Benedict recently bemoaned the influence of "professional Catholics," he was referring inter alia to those who butter their bread by pretending to represent Catholic intellectual culture but who instead distort it beyond recognition. In America today, that description fits almost anybody who publicly confesses the name "Catholic." It fits the entire Novus Ordo church and its established corridors of power. That the Novus Ordo is a house built on sand is a fact that becomes more undeniable with each passing day.

Libya, Part Two: (From Belmont Club)

2011-03-30T13:38:00.001-06:00

57. Wretchard,

That source you cited should silence anybody who still thinks that Peak Oil is not a problem. In fact it is the problem.

The true nature of Peak Oil has been misunderstood by almost everybody. It has nothing to do with how much oil is left in the ground. (There will always be oil left in the ground, and it will always be available to wealthy people at a sufficient price.) It has to do with being able to get at the oil and utilize it efficiently on a civilizational scale. The real issues are geopolitical, demographic, and infrastructural, not geological.

When the supply of oil tightens for any reason (i.e revolutions in the Maghreb, or what have you), the price rises, inefficient uses are trimmed back, poorer customers are priced out of the market altogether, and civilization begins to creak. The price of all basic commodities is closely tied to the price of oil, not only because of the transportation factor, but also because oil is an important raw material in industrial processes. Whenever some persistent consumer is willing to pay a premium for that last barrel of oil, the marginal price of all barrels increases by the same amount, and eventually the economy feels the pain.

Because we cannot afford to consume oil as lavishly as we did before, we have to make less, do less, drive less, consume less; pay more, work more, sacrifice more, and suffer more. The total output of the economy shrinks. In such an environment, it is vain to talk of being rescued by alternative sources of energy. Where will the investment capital come from to bring those sources on line? Where will the technical expertise and labor come from? Any plausible scheme to improve the energy supply (whether by increased oil and gas exploration, nuclear power, coal gasification, renewables, or whatever), will take dozens of years and trillions of dollars to complete, while in the meantime the overall economy continues to dwindle. And "conservation" merely races the demon over the cliff. Conservation means that we do to ourselves the same thing that our nemesis is trying to do to us anyway. We will not have enough money to build the necessary infrastructure to reinflate our bubble economy. And even if we did, investment capital chases the highest rate of return, and the floundering energy sector will not be offering the highest rate of return. It will be a money pit, an eldering kept woman who no longer pulls her own weight.

However, since it seems we will be unable to do without the energy, we will have to make the investment anyway, and do so at a loss. Hence it will have to be a labor of love. But the free market does not think very kindly of labors of love; Adam Smith's invisible hand wants to be greased, not calloused by long hours of tedium. Since market mechanisms will not of their own provide the necessary capital, the funding will have to be enforced through the tax structure, and we will all become the slaves of energy. Without realizing it, the populations of whole regions will be converted into some sort of oleaginous latifundium for the maintenance of the few surviving industrial conglomerates.

This is the end of the West, its last desperate grasp at mere survival (its honor and dignity have long since been sold away). If this were our only problem it would be formidable enough, but remember this is all happening against the background of a much larger catastrophe. We have aging and declining populations in the US, Europe, and Japan. We have completely unsustainable pension and welfare programs about to go broke. We have a generation of young people that is less educated, less healthy, and less morally competent than their parents, and who are completely unprepared to deal with this. And we still have borders to defend against an increasingly numerous, increasingly dangerous horde of third-world malcontents. We have weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of tribal warlords who will use them just for fun if they get the chance. We have given ourselves over to greed and perversion. Our once-noble religion has been wussified by liberal progressives. We are no longer worthy of our success, and our discomfiture is beginning to tell upon us. How in the world will we survive this intact?

Call me pessimistic, but I don't think it can be done. Like an old forest giant, we have run up against the physical limits of our growth. We can no longer put forth enough leaves to gather all the sunlight we need to thrive, and far below the root system cannot drink enough water to keep the remaining leaves healthy. And while we may continue to thrust suckering branches toward the sky for years to come, the true period of organic growth, the saga, is over.

Probably the best policy for individuals now is to try to avoid contact with Empire as much as possible, neither paying nor receiving from the system, cultivating a detached indifference to matters of government. Perhaps you can hold off the external decay long enough that it does not affect the hearts and minds of your children, and your posterity will one day make landfall in a future age when organic growth is possible again. But for us here today, the tasks before us are grim and pitiless. Let us look not for happiness but for the pride of duty, and so write our names down with those who pulled the world back from the brink.

Libya, Part One: (From Belmont Club)

2011-03-29T16:13:00.001-06:00

Back in those contentious days immediately succeeding the execution of Saddam Hussein, I began to speculate on possible alternative courses the events might have taken. This was occasioned by the fact that, against my own wishes, I found the execution to be a strangely maudlin display. It wasn’t that Saddam did not deserve his fate; it was that we, his conquerors, did not pay him the honor of killing him ourselves, but remanded him instead to the custody of his sectarian enemies. For me, this made an end to any pretenses of nobility that clung to the Bush Doctrine. The result of Saddam’s capture and trial could not have been more to the liking of the Brussels crowd, and it would have been had they not already held such an irrational animus against Americans and Republicans. But in permitting it to transpire thus, Bush implicitly validated the premises on which the Transnational Left at least nominally bases its positions: international law, international peacekeeping forces, world-jurisdictional courts, and other such-like extravagancies. I suppose this was done out of some misguided attempt to engender an outcome that was both useful and politic, but in that case it miscarried badly. Politically speaking, Bush’s popularity at home could scarcely have been worse (and might have been a bit better) if he had simply flown to Iraq and personally cut Saddam’s heart out. And as for usefulness, I fear we have only sent the message to dictators around the world that, when dealing with America, surrender is no longer an option. Better to fight it out and die like a man than to be thrown like meat to your home-grown jackals. Saddam was “marked for death,” as it were: he could not fight, could not sue for peace, could not surrender, and could not win. He couldn’t even run away. It is an outcome that perhaps the game-theorists in the Pentagon would love, but it is anything but noble. I wondered if there was a better option.

Hence my excursions into alternative history. One of the possibilities I explored (and not exactly one I endorse, by the way) was to accord Saddam the dignity proper to a conquered Head of State, and allow him to live out his days in exile in America—under guard, of course, but retaining a semblance of his former wealth and status. I could picture him placed under house-arrest in some capacious South Florida mansion, marveling over the ironies of his fate. I suspect that, once the initial novelty had passed, the American public would grow accustomed to having a Saddam in their midst, and might even come to regard with amusement some of his peculiarities, just as they have the recent antics of Charlie Sheen. How long do you think it would be before he was inking his memoirs and appearing in Pizza Hut™ commercials, or dropping in via satellite on the Sunday news shows? I cannot but think that his commentaries on the escalating events in the Middle East would be pored over with great interest.

This was fantasy, of course. Notwithstanding the security difficulties of maintaining an opulently caged Saddam, it would simply be unjust to allow him to live in peace and comfort while his country was going through the agony of war and restructuring. The funny thing is, it seems like something similar actually figures to happen to Khadaffi. The lessons of the Iraq War provide us with several possible strains of analysis, some of which cross-cut and contradict each other; and I’m not sure how the final symmetries will actually shake out. In the meantime, however, I offer the following analogies as food for thought.

1) The Obama Administration, despite the distance which Obama tried to put between his own position and the Bush Doctrine in last night’s speech, has succeeded not only in recapitulating that doctrine but even in magnifying its errors. Where Bush refused to try Saddam himself, Obama refuses even to fight Khadaffi himself. Where Bush handed Saddam over to his rebellious factions to be hung, Obama hands Khadaffi’s rebellious factions the rope. Where Bush led a loose but internationally recognized coalition of the willing, Obama trails an internationally tendentious consortium of the desperate. And while the Left in this country bemoaned Bush’s lack of an exit strategy, when it came their turn to fight they fecklessly refused to propound even an entrance strategy. The actions of the present Administration evince no clear goal beyond justifying the President’s existence in the White House.

2) Even though that vituperative little maggot, Sarkozy, seems to be prosecuting the Libyan War with more than the usual French bitterness, would anybody think it at all absurd if Khadaffi simply fled to the Riviera, with a full military escort, and died a natural death there while awaiting a skillfully delayed trial at the Hague? The subsequent successes of French and Italian national corporations in Libya, with the notable cooporation of the remnants of Khadaffi’s regime, being of course entirely coincidental?

Or perhaps I’m being too cynical. Time will tell.

Industrial Strength Blat

2011-03-26T22:34:00.003-06:00

My paper analyzing the effects of informality, barter, and hysteresis in Russian-Ukrainian natural gas relations. (Click on the "Full Page" Icon to read.)

Industrial Strength Blat -

Kingdoms of Blood and Spirit.

2011-03-12T22:37:00.006-07:00

In very general terms, any time you spend money on an activity that “the market will not support,” you know that the activity in question is symbolic and totemic; that is to say, it belongs to the same genre as monumental architecture, fine arts, and religious worship. All active life (i.e all animal existence) divides itself into the Kingdom of the Blood and the Kingdom of the Spirit. The blood kingdom operates entirely at a material level, concerning itself with that which is necessary for the upkeep of existence itself. This is the sphere to which economics properly belongs, the sphere in which the laws of supply and demand (which are only the laws of thermodynamics adjusted for the presence of living actors) will yield reliable results. Activity in this sphere achieves its objective when it conduces to the health, maintenance, and eventual flourishing of the individual and his estate.

The spirit kingdom, on the other hand, concerns itself with that which is true, meaningful, and significant. It is the higher of the two kingdoms, for it corresponds more faithfully to the natural end of man, which is to know, love, and serve God. It is the spirit (and not the flesh) which is responsible for social order, justice, learning, virtue, and excellence of all kinds. For this end, resources are diverted from the kingdom of blood to produce those ends which the spirit of truth that is in a man, requires.

Idealist philosophers like Kant made the mistake of assuming that if we could understand the mechanics of the pure spirit, that fact alone would be sufficient for producing a truly just society, which would necessarily include the perfectly harmonious allocation of means to ends. However, they were mistaken. Man’s spirit is corrupted and fallen, his reason darkened, and his appetites confused and misdirected. His spirit, which which was made to feed on truth for the production of virtue, now feeds on lies for the production of sin. All pride and envy, murder, lies, greed, and foolishness are also the fruits of the spirit, for they are the product of a misused will.

Flash back to the case of NPR. We know that NPR belongs not to the kingdom of blood, for if it did it would have a natural and unforced profit associated with it. It does not have this, so therefore it belongs to the kingdom of spirit. There is nothing wrong with this per se, for all of mankind’s finest works belong to the spirit. However, that which is spiritual is only virtuous if it also bears witness to the truth, otherwise it belongs to the kingdom not as a citizen but as an interloper and a criminal. Does NPR bear witness to the truth? It certainly does not. It is a totem in the Church of Liberalism, the Church of Satan and his lies and pomps, bearing witness only to the wackiness and treachery by which the professional Left sets its seal.

This is why it must not receive federal money, not because it is unprofitable without it, but because it poisons man’s spiritual existence with its black religion. You might think that the champions of the separation of church and state might apply their logic fairly and recognize that NPR is religious in nature, and deny it federal funding on those grounds alone. But of course they will not, and it is not an argument I will make either. The separation of church and state is an illusion drawn from the tumults of a previous revolutionary era; it never should have been held up as a model for enlightened society. For the entire purpose of the kingdom of blood (of which the state is the perfection) is to support the kingdom of spirit (of which the Church is the perfection). We are damned if we continue to pour out our blood in support of the Left’s insane religious imperatives as witnessed through NPR. But we are equally damned if we do not pour out our blood in support of the truth, which is Christ and His Church. It is never the case that the state does not lend its support to any church. The only choice is between supporting the true Church and supporting a false one. We have chosen poorly.

“Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” we are told to pray. What is this but an insistence that the kingdoms of earth and blood bear witness to the kingdoms of spirit and truth? That is why the separation of church and state cannot hold. But the kingdom of truth is not a Kantian Republic of purely rational laws; it is a Church whose head is Christ, whose vicar is Peter, and whose message is the Gospel. It cannot tolerate any dilution or adulteration or false ecumenism. Therefore there will eventually be a battle between the supports of Christ and the supporters of NPR. They will not abide each other and they know it. Until the case is made, until the battle is waged, until the truth is proclaimed with all vigor, we cannot hope for much improvement in our material or spiritual condition. The denizens of the Left, a destructive brood of vipers if ever there was one, misrepresent themselves as secularists and take refuge behind the dubious legal premises of free speech and other misbegotten maxims from the Spirit of ’89. Those of us who are “conservatives,” who long for an organic ordering of society and a return of the perennial philosophy, must root them out of these strongholds. Argue with them if you must; make converts of them if you can; but never forget to oppose them in fact and deed. This means getting rid of their funding and taking control of the organs of state which funnel it to them. To do less than this is to allow the enemy to hang around in our midst. It is to do less than we can and less than we ought.

The world is changing; the global economy is creaking; events are lining up for a fin de siècle conflagration. And what with the widespread malaise over Obama, the union defeat in Wisconsin, and the revelations stacking up day by day (including this piece about NPR), it appears that the Left is ready to fall. Let us not waste the opportunity.

“He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters.” Stand up for the truth, and put an end to NPR.

Epistemology and Miracles

2010-11-05T20:46:00.003-06:00

In this paper I will defend the claim that we are sometimes justified in believing that a miracle has occurred, and I will examine three criteria (two necessary, one sufficient) for making that determination. Since I have not the space here for a thoroughgoing exploration of the topic, certain considerations must be omitted from our discussion. I will not, for example, set forth a general theory of knowledge in the light of which miraculous claims may be included as a subset of acceptable propositions, nor will I attempt rigorously to criticize various skeptical arguments to the contrary. Instead, I will assume that there exists in all fully functioning human beings a basic process of belief-formation which, while perhaps not amenable to explicit presentation, is nonetheless intuitively solid enough to be taken as a datum. Using this as a starting point, I will simply describe the analytic conditions under which a miracle can be said to have occurred, given that the justification for belief in said miracle must ultimately rest upon the same mysterious process which justifies the rest of our more prosaic beliefs. On this account, a miracle requires no special epistemic warrant; it is simply a type of belief, and it falls to us to analyze the type of belief that it is.

Since the term “miracle” has rather a broad application in contemporary usage, most of our ensuing discussion—indeed all of it—will derive its impetus from the manner in which we choose to define it. I take it for granted that we are not interested in colloquialisms (e.g., “It will be a miracle if the Broncos make it to the Super Bowl this year.”), but in the traditional religious sense of the word, viz. a suspension of the natural order, carrying with it a supreme moral or revelatory significance, and seemingly emanating from the heart of reality itself, i.e. God. This definition contains explicitly all that is comprehended in the concept of miracle as such. Consequently, it contains implicitly the very criteria by which we are to judge purportedly miraculous occurrences. The remainder of this paper will focus on the three distinguishing marks of the miraculous, with commentary on the unique epistemological concerns relevant to each, and will conclude with a prima facie argument that any set of conditions minimally requisite for justified human belief-formation would also require the admittance of miraculous occurrences into our general picture of reality. The criteria I mean to examine, then, are these:

Condition One: Natural Insufficiency

A miracle is a sense-perceptible event, not a subjective interpretation of an event. By declaring them thus, we rule out the possibility that miraculous claims can be reduced to merely ordinary occurrences that happen to have a high symbolic value for people in a particular state of mind. Miracles happen “in the field of nature;” and like every other natural event, they can be objectively witnessed and subjected to various tests. The first criterion of a miracle, then, is that it is a physical occurrence that exceeds the ordinary powers of nature to produce. But this immediately raises a problem: If we do not have an exhaustive description of the laws of nature (and few would argue that we do), then how can we say of a certain event that it is beyond the capacities of nature to perform? Perhaps there are unknown laws of nature that could produce the same effect; or alternatively, perhaps there are individual laws of nature, each severally known more-or-less exhaustively, that can combine in unexpected ways, under unusual circumstances, to produce it.

However, this objection would have force only on the supposition that there are no known laws of nature, the violation of which would strike us as impossible in the natural course of events. On the contrary, if there are such laws, then there is something in reference to which a miracle can be defined. Therefore, if an event seems to violate the most fundamental and generally applicable physical principles that we know of, then we can conclude with certainty that it “exceeds the ordinary powers of nature to produce.”

And there are such principles. There exist, namely, the so-called “conservation laws” of matter and energy, and also the second law of thermodynamics, which we might call the conservation law of entropy. These laws are not so much empirical discoveries as they are a priori necessities of systematic physical theorizing, for any physics that failed to include them would be unreliable and worthless. If an event violates any of these, then whatever else it may be, it must certainly derive from somewhere beyond the system of nature-knowledge. The first condition is thus shown to be a necessary condition; for if nature herself can produce the effect, it is ipso facto not miraculous. Intelligent people can disagree about whether the condition is ever satisfied in practice, but we have shown it to be at least satisfiable in principle. We have thus denied a leg to those skeptics who say, following Hume, that “whatever happens is natural and the unnatural does not happen.” This statement’s first conjunct is defeasible due to the fact that hypothetical and otherwise believable events may nevertheless trespass the strict nomological relationships inherent in the concept of “nature.”

But the first condition is not sufficient for authenticating a miracle. There is more going on in the world than just the blind operation of physical laws: there are also intelligent beings who contend with and against these laws, and who are capable of devising many ingenious tricks of self-deception. When giving a full description of a miracle, we do not want to know merely what happened, but also why it happened. Why were the laws of nature suspended for this person, at this particular time and place, and not others? To answer that question we must discuss not only how miracles relate to the laws that govern nature, but also how they relate to the laws that govern rational creatures—and that leads us to our second condition.

Condition Two: Narrative Applicability

If a tree unnaturally materializes in a forest, and there’s no one around to see it, is that a miracle? And furthermore, does anybody care? The answers to these questions are, respectively, “no” and “no.” Miracles never happen outside of a personal context—they happen to somebody, and they happen to a purpose. All miraculous claims of which I am aware can be subsumed under the general headings of supernatural healings and provisions, military victories, and prophetic apparitions disclosing important information. In other words, one effect of miracles is to fulfill the moral and physical needs of human beings under conditions in which those needs would not otherwise be met. But this reading assumes that there is some sort of teleology supervening over the lives of individual humans, and over human history as a whole. A story is being told; and the purpose of the miracle is to impact the story at critical junctures, and to bring about the desirable ending. Thus, the second criterion of a genuine miracle is its narrative applicability.

The inclusion of this criterion is made necessary by the fact that a miracle must be received and understood as such before it can be believed. Therefore it must have some sort of cognizable structure or recognizable quality about it, despite issuing from beyond the boundary of physical law. A miracle that served no human purpose would be superfluous if not harmful, and would hardly be worthy of the name. It would be more like a local breakdown of order altogether, a fissure pouring forth chaos and mayhem into the universe. Obviously such an event could never be given a meaningful interpretation. It could not appear in human consciousness except as the sort of radical negation that is not encountered outside of explicitly philosophical speculation, and that would violate the previous stipulation that miracles be sense-perceptible.

The second criterion, then, is also seen to be necessary: any non-natural event that has no narrative applicability—an event not ordered to the fulfillment of human needs—is ipso facto not a miracle. Whether or not such events may nevertheless occur is, of course, a separate question; but if they did occur, they would doubtless not be called miracles, and that is our only concern at present. So we have reached a point where we can safely conclude that miracles, while indeed representing violations of physical law, yet conform to a higher law of reason and structure, rooted in the inmost needs of human beings. But this condition too is not sufficient, for it does not follow from it that these supposed miracles are not produced through the agency of some less-than-divine will, in which case they would not “emanate from the heart of reality.” For that we need a further condition, to which we will now turn.

Condition Three: The Holiness Criterion

In order to be fully convinced that our candidate miracle has a divine provenance, we must be able to ground it in some ontological precept “than which no greater can be thought,” in the words of St. Anselm. We cannot rule out the possibility that there are persons in the universe who are sensitive to hidden truths, who can consolidate powers not generally known, and who can use these powers to produce seemingly miraculous effects. I think the existence of such persons is in fact quite likely; thus we stand in need of some criterion capable of distinguishing genuine miracles from the counterfeits of a profound and clever magician. In other words, we need some way of telling miracles apart from sorcery. This would not be possible unless we accepted some version of the ontological argument for God’s existence. I do not mean to reprise that argument here, for in the present context it raises the spectre of circularity. I do not intend to argue in such a way that my conclusion becomes: “I can believe in miracles because I can believe in God.” Rather, I am assuming several things about the state of mind of the person who wishes to verify that the event he has just witnessed is in fact a miracle. First of all, I am assuming that this person is already convinced of God’s existence on quite other grounds, i.e. the ontological argument. I am also assuming that the event he’s just witnessed completely fulfills the first two conditions, thus giving him a strong warrant for believing in its miraculousness. Now just as he is about to give his assent to the proposition that “Since what I have just witnessed was a miracle, I can be sure it was God who performed it,” a skeptic comes along and poses a Kierkegaardian conundrum: How do you know your miracle was not produced by someone else?

This question, if unanswerable, would prove fatal for the miracle-claim, since it follows from our definition that only God can perform miracles. But we cannot take the low road of simply defining miracles into existence, so we need some independent way of showing why the definition must hold. This way is provided by the holiness criterion. In accepting the ontological argument we have also accepted its correlates—namely, that God is a necessary and perfect being who is good-itself (i.e. holy), and that God is the only such being. Therefore the quality of holiness can be predicated only of God. And since God is not a deceiver (borrowing a page from Descartes), we know that any event carrying with it the aura of holiness gives us thereby the clear and distinct idea that it was produced by God and only by God.

The third condition is the king-maker. It is the only truly sufficient condition for granting a warrant of miraculous occurrence, but it does not operate in isolation from the other two. The final justification for belief in miracles can now be expressed by the following complex conditional:

If an event gives me the clear and distinct impression of holiness then, provided that conditions (1) and (2) are also satisfied, I know that the event was a miracle performed by God (and not by anyone else).

Notice that the entailment does not also run the other way around—this definition does not say that everything holy is necessarily a miracle. And that is an important feature of the theory, for God’s holiness can of course find expression in other, non-miraculous ways. What the theory does do is provide an unambiguous test by which to distinguish miracles from all other possible experiences. Therefore it is an indispensable component of any further justification for belief in miracles, which was to be shown.

Conclusion

The claim I defended in this paper was a subjunctive conditional: “If there were miracles, then they would be thus-and-so.” I have said nothing to the effect that miracles actually are. I know of no proof that could be given a skeptic that would satisfy him on this account, and in fact I think it quite impossible to devise one. But I also think that the separate elements presented here collectively provide a rather strong prima facie argument that miracles ought to be accepted. In the first place, we have shown that natural laws are a necessity of all human thought pertaining to physical systems; but that, paradoxically, their violation is not only not unthinkable, but has often enough been justifiably believed. Secondly, we have shown that miraculous claims are never arbitrary with respect to human life, as they might be expected to be if the events in question did no meaningful work and were not ordered to a purpose. Finally, we have shown that the experience of holiness, which is among the more ubiquitous experiences of mankind, is sufficient for a belief in miracles when certain other conditions obtain. Search the annals of epistemology though we may, we are unlikely to find any better justification for belief-claims than the combination of possibility, empirical validation, and near-universal agreement. The miracle concept meets these standards, and skeptics should reconsider their position.

Epistemology and Miracles -

They think, therefore they are not

2009-09-05T13:21:00.001-06:00

In a posthumously republished article at FIRST THINGS, the late Father Richard John Neuhaus laments the spiritual bankruptcy of academic Religious Studies. He should. But he should also have taken a look at his own legacy. Here are my remarks:

This article by Father Neuhaus is perfectly accurate. The only problem is that he himself exemplified the very faults he is decrying, as do most of the regular contributors and editorial staff here at FIRST THINGS. They are intellectuals all; masters of sophisticated gibberish, of dialectic, of the over-indulged adversary and of the never-quite-reached conclusion. Father Neuhaus, as we all know per his own self-depictions, was basically a “good liberal,” a man of the sort who thinks that the Social Revolution was not wrong, but that it didn’t go far enough. How telling is that famous picture of him standing next to Martin Luther King Jr., jaw set and eyes fixed, no doubt feeling himself very much in the right, having the good conscience at his back, ready to strike a blow for social justice, doing “the Lord’s work.” Did he know at the time that he was helping to set the standard by which all future liberalism in this country would operate, and that the standard would be one of social agitation, manufactured victimization and enforced pathology, all of it wrapped up and peddled to the lumpen-laity with pseudo-religious platitudes about “helping the poor” and “loving thy neighbor?” If not, then he certainly had ample time consider the aftermath, and it may be that he recognized the truth in the end. One of his last appearances on EWTN was for the purpose providing commentary for the papal mass in New York, which (if memory serves me right) he ridiculed as a “preening and overweening multicultural mishmash.”

Well said. Nevertheless, his approach to confronting unpleasant cultural tendencies was marked by both extreme intellectualization and a spirit of sympathy bordering on conciliation, as is that of the magazine he founded. These methods are ineffective. The ostensible purpose of FIRST THINGS is to “advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.” A quick glance around the society so ordered by Neuhaus & Co. shows exactly how successful that venture has been. Irony of ironies, Neuhaus was planting the seed for that mishmash mass when he decided to agitate alongside Dr. King. The rest is history.

It is the eternal fate of intellectuals to be ever standing on the wrong side of life, doing the devil’s work with the noblest intentions. This is because the intellect is capable only of criticism, never of construction. It apprehends and judges only what is unequal; it revels in the discovery of abnormality. Not that the intellect, by its own operations, can ever normalize the defects it discovers; it can only complain, and that complaint is always in the service of power. Subtly and inexorably it strengthens the ego, birthing that adamantine chip on the shoulder which is the hallmark of all revolutionaries, drawing the sympathies of those similarly afflicted, until at last the man is ready to rob an murder in the name of a social ideal which at its bottom can be shown to be nothing but a globalized personal gripe. Short of an actual revolution, there are always the perquisites of academic tenure to consider; the thrills of being a subversive, of tapping into the raw energies behind the misgivings of youth, of becoming “hip” and aloof, living life with a permanent sneer of mockery emblazoned across one’s face. Finally, for those without the skills to hack it in academia, there is the bliss of never-ending childhood that forms the secret pleasure of all victim-complexes; the pleasure of fisted-glove piracy which the victims affect by their ever-present threat of agitation; a life without real demands upon the faculties, without anxiety, without out accomplishment; a life lived in the consoling embrace of darkness.

We need look no further to understand why academic Religious Studies is a spiritually stunted project. That is its whole purpose. That’s what it is; that’s what it does. It was not the result of a mistake, but belongs essentially to what intellectualization is all about. What Father Neuhaus & Co. fail to realize is that the unilluminated intellect can never serve as a reliable ally in the quest for spiritual depth, and that therefore their own efforts are often similarly benighted. The intellect plays but a small and not very important part in the affairs of men. The true transformation of society will require the strength of the blood. It is imperative that the Church begin to function once again as a political organism, eschewing not the methods and tactics of temporal power. The alternative will be the complete dissolution of Christianity into a generalized system of social ethics. There are even powerful forces within the Church who desire this very end. The Great Laicization Project, marked by strong appeals to the freedom of conscience and by the ostensible-but-misguided desire to keep the purity of the Church free from state interference (its chief architect at present is George Weigel), must fail if Christianity is to succeed. In its place must needs be an aristocratic Church that can lead society in the right direction by example and command; a Church that cuts the Gordian knot of over-tense argumentation and entrenched political convenience. The current crop of intellectuals is ill-fitted to affect this transformation. They think, therefore they are not.

The Decline of Scientific Publishing Standards, and Publishing Standards in General

2009-08-20T12:48:00.002-06:00

At John Reilly’s site, the commenter HopefulCynic68 has an interesting post about the decline of standards in the magazine publishing industry. This thread provides immense food for thought; indeed, it presses the trigger on several loaded barrels that I’ve been meaning to fire off lately, especially vis-à-vis the precipitous drop in educational standards. However, since I find that subject very difficult to discuss dispassionately, I have for the time being confined my response to those issues pertinent to scientific publications (and why I no longer read them). The line in HopefulCynic68’s post that occasioned my response was this:

“Even the comments on the trends in the magazine world matched my own observations, such as the lefty drift of Scientific American (which is becoming sufficiently pronounced as to damage the credibility of the publication), and the recent improvement in Popular Mechanics. If that trend holds, the 'lowbrow' PM might just steal some thunder from some supposedly highbrow sources.”

I used to love reading Scientific American as a young teenager, circa early-to-mid nineties. As I recall, the magazine was at that time a vehicle for the best popular science writing around. Of the many attractions it offered, one could expect at least a half dozen lengthy, well-written articles per issue, mathematical puzzles by Martin Gardener, the wonderful Connections column by James Burke, and colorful graphics that were among the best in the business. I especially enjoyed the articles on physics and astronomy, which as a rule were included in every issue.

But by the late nineties I began to notice a serious downward trend in the quality of the scientific thinking behind the articles in the magazine. I had a difficult time of it, having to admit that I could no longer lie to myself about the serious methodological flaws that they allowed to slip into print. I had to question the reasoning behind many of the conclusions drawn in the articles, and I came to the uncomfortable realization that a good portion of the scientific establishment did not know when a thing was proven and when it wasn't.

I still remember the exact statement that caused me to lay the magazine aside, never to pick it up again. The year was 1999, early in the summer. I was reading a blurb about plate tectonics, in which a pair of geologists was claiming that great quantities of ocean water were being dragged down into the mantle with the subduction of oceanic plates. This much is certainly true, but the geologists proceeded from these humble beginnings to a rather flippant apocalyptic prediction. The subducting water, they said, posed no threat to the sea levels of planet earth for most of its history, because the interior of the planet was so hot that the water would be quickly converted to high-pressure steam and vented back to the surface. However, by late pre-Cambrian times the interior of earth had cooled sufficiently, such that the water was carried deep into the mantle where it was lost to chemical disassociation, and "sea levels have since dropped more than 2000 feet."

It would be an interesting exercise to enumerate all the errors contained in that statement, but we need not proceed further than to note that there is absolutely no geophysical evidence to support the conclusion that sea levels were ever that much higher than they are now. A 2000 ft higher sea would have inundated much of the continental landmass of the planet, and that simply hasn't happened. Whatever the geologists' speculations about the chemistry of the mantle might have told them, there is no prima facie case that their assertions are at all true. The known geological record is incompatible with what they have stated.

As an aside, I might also mention that I was thumbing through an issue of Discover magazine at a bookstore sometime in 2004, when I saw what had to be one of the most ridiculous examples of scientific illogicity ever to appear in print. To wit: New research had apparently revealed that the class of antidepressant drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors were not really at all efficacious in increasing the amount of the neurotransmitter serotonin in the synaptic cleft; a finding which, if true, would invalidate decades' worth of theorizing concerning the neurophysiology of depression. "Thus," read the byline of the article, "Scientists were under new pressure to figure out why antidepressants work."

Evidently, the idea that antidepressants do not work had never crossed the minds of the editors at Discover; the materialistic myth of the physically determined mind was too much of a non-negotiable element in their worldview. Here we have a case in which the entire theoretical justification for their understanding of the causes and cures of depression had fallen away, and yet these drugs were still somehow, mysteriously, osmotically, occultically held to "work." It ought to go without saying that a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor has absolutely no attributable mechanism of action that would be profitable for relieving depression if low serotonin levels aren't the cause of that malady; and this becomes even more ironically and laughably true given that the substance in question does not even inhibit the reuptake of serotonin. But none of this is likely to make an impact on the so-called scientific community. I mumbled something about "cycles and epicycles" and put the magazine back on the shelf. They'll endorse the notion of homeopathic SSRIs before they abandon their model.

Bio-psychiatry is a large, lucrative, and harmful fraud that directly affects the lives of the untold millions of people who have been told (and sometimes forced) to take these useless and potentially dangerous substances. It is the redux of phrenology, but perpetrated with even less romance and human understanding than its forbear. It is, however, not the only such fraud to which the contemporary scientific establishment has given its imprimatur. At the top of the list we have the massive Anthropogenic Global Warming hoax, and the attendant possibility of serious damage to the U.S. economy if its backers succeed in implementing their agenda. Other entrenched errors of reasoning are less immediately threatening but no less egregious. The ideas of "dark matter" and "dark energy" postulated to explain the contradictions observed in the material content of the universe are naught but mere phantasms. Darwinian evolution has been utterly thrown down by the evidence, only to be revived by ad hoc notions of "punctuated equilibrium" and "inclusive fitness" (both oxymorons).

The list could be extended, but it is not necessary to continue. It is clear enough already that real theoretical science has been replaced by an insipid and rather unmanly appetite for pleasing visions, technological gimmickry, "signs and wonders" -- it is science according to Herod Antipas. The Principia Mathematica has fallen to The Tao of Physics. The trend will be reversed eventually; the necessity of living demands it. But when contemporary scientific fluff goes, it will take most of the philosophical presuppositions of modern society with it.

Right is Right and Left is Left...

2009-08-14T18:28:00.004-06:00

…and never the twain shall meet.

Anyway, that was Oswald Spengler's understanding of the relationship between basic political philosophies, and it's my understanding, too. However, our friend Richard Fernandez does not seem to share in that assessment. In a recent post at The Belmont Club discussing the political Left's ability to out-woo and out-network their competitors on the Right (thus winning more and closer friends for themselves), the redoubtable Wretchard had this to say:

"The real secret to gaining on the Left isn’t to offer up a more cogent argument or to present more compelling facts. It’s to outfriend them; to open up a door that will make the undecideds out in the cold come in and feel loved. On the day conservatives sweep the Facebook groups they will sweep the world."

There is a profound fallacy involved in this type of thinking. It is in the same family as that fallacy which causes many modern religious people to reduce the essence of Christianity to some ersatz "social doctrine." Such people forget that the Church's first priority is to proclaim the Gospel of Christ's love to man, and therefore she undertakes to love them and to better their lot. There is no sense in having the betterment without the Gospel, for the Church does not exist to be some religiously-themed Red Cross knockoff. She exists to redeem souls, to sanctify the world, and to lead us into all truth; and the truth, be it said, is larger than our material well-being as such.

In the present context, the fallacy has consequences less eternal but no less erroneous than the secularization of Christianity. The political Right cannot seek to become more like the Left without losing its identity in the process. As a purely practical matter, we may note that this strategy has already been tried and found wanting (notice that President John McCain remains a fixture of Alternative History); but more importantly, once we de-sensationalize Richard's argument by removing the references to humanitarian warmth and internet technology, we see that it reduces to little more than a blatant endorsement of panum et circenses. The Right is here exhorted to use any means at its disposal to purchase the affections of prospective coreligionists.

Now here are the facts as Spengler saw them, and as I think most clear-headed people see them. Tools like social networking, affection-peddling, and outcast-courting are not morally neutral techniques of which the Left has availed itself and the Right has not (but yet may, to its advantage); they are subversive practices which issue from the very heart of Leftist ideology and remain forever bound up with it. As G. K. Chesterton once observed, the morality a man really has is not the morality he discusses, but the morality he takes for granted. It is taken for granted by the Left that "numbers win the battle," and that man's greatest good is found in living a comfortable life on earth. To these ends, they assemble coalitions (mobs) to act as unwitting soldiers for them by making empty promises of material abundance and justice (the greatest good for the greatest number). They see nothing transcendent, nothing noble, nothing worthy of sacrifice, and no value in the individual or in the strugglings of great souls.

The Right is very different. We believe first and foremost in the transcendent, and we allow it to inform our every political decision. We put the good of the soul above all earthly goods. The Right draws its strength not from numbers but from the innate superiority of its principles, the very principles that Wretchard says aren't enough to win with. Remember, there can never really be any such thing as a conservative party, for the whole notion of governing parties is liberal through and through. The party is basically the engine and the incarnation of liberal thought: it is mean, "democratic," supra-individualistic, and irreligious. The party's vision begins and ends entirely in the earthy plain. The Right, on the other hand, consists of free and responsible souls who will stand or fall only according to their faith: it is (not coincidentally) the principle of righteousness which triumphs over numbers, weight, and all other material factors.

We remember that God raised up a Moses, a Gideon, a David, an Elijah, and a Daniel to fulfill His mighty purposes, against every sort of earthy odds. I have yet to read about Him raising up a collective to do anything. If the Right wishes to succeed, it must do so by having a 'Thermopylae" moment: it must stand in the breach and intercede, rooted in nothing but faith. This is the sign of its election. To resort to other means indicates a lack of faith and a dangerous dilution of principle. We must decide what we really believe. The opportunity to stand tall and prevail is even now upon us. We must hope and strive to prove worthy of it.

I guess I'll have to weigh in on Tiller

2009-06-02T23:27:00.005-06:00

Edward Feser has posted his thoughts on the recent murder of abortion doctor George Tiller. I'm too jaded to come up with much of a response to these things, but my reply follows, for what it's worth:

I think it's curious to see so many members of the pro-life movement going to such great lengths to condemn Tiller's murder. I am not speaking of Dr. Feser's post, but of Fr. Frank Pavone, for instance. They doth protest too much, methinks. It's almost as if they expect the political ramifications to backfire on them.

The fact of the matter is that Tiller's murder will have almost zero political consequences, one way or the other. It will not change anybody's opinion about abortion, or the pro-life movement, or the laws of the land. It will not be brought up in political ads or debates. It will be completely forgotten within a week.

This suggests to me that there is a meta-narrative going on above and beyond the talking points on both sides of the abortion debate. Most people do not seem particularly eager to see the issue resolved, nor have they given serious strategic consideration to the measures necessary to resolve it. Both camps focus on converting individual hearts and minds within the context of the current legislative regime. But this is no real answer; it is only a prolongation of the debate, and this dilatory tactic is deliberate.

I think there are great uncertainties at work deep in the bosom of our collective psyche. The pro-lifers aren't quite sure they want to live with the strictures of their own moral code, and the pro-choicers aren't quite sure that abortion isn't a grave evil. This uncertainty will ensure that the Tiller matter gets promptly buried. It's too real, too plain, and too sober a fact to confront, just like the facts of abortion itself.

When being confronted with these facts, the great majority of people have no idea what to do. They will simply turn away and distract themselves with something else, like a child who hears that his father just lost his job. He knows there is something dreadfully wrong, but there is nothing he can do but "act childish," revert to helplessness, sink into the dark currents of unconscious being. Abortion itself is a symptom of this sinking, but most of the debate surrounding it is not much of an improvement. The catchwords are verbal palliatives designed to obscure and soften reality. Roeder lept up like a flame in this darkness, expended himself in one devastating burst, and flickered out again, of no more consequence than a firefly in the woods; and the earth turns still, untroubled.

This is the wretchedness of mankind, the slow and pointless burn, the bitter necessities that cause him to forget and accept all manner of heinous abuses. The only cure is the breaking in of the transcendent God which elevates man to the heights of creation. This alone makes him capable of self-sacrifice and noble purpose. Blessed are those who have ears to hear Him. Pray, O pray ye all, that it may be you.

War and Recovery

2009-05-30T23:34:00.002-06:00

Richard Fernandez quotes an Australian Army officer's thoughts about the future of Iraq:

The future of Iraq is unknowable,’ he said, ‘but it has started again.’ That remark didn’t answer any questions about the future of events, but it helped frame my expectations.

I have responded with some cynical (but hopefully not too cynical) thoughs of my own:

I fully agree, but the corollary of this statement is that nobody involved in Iraq policy-making can possibly know what the hell they’re doing, and at this point one strategy is pretty much as good as another.

I think it was right around the 2006 midterm elections (USA) when I finally concluded that strategy was a moot subject in the Iraq War. It simply didn’t matter anymore. Iraq was going to recover someday (and be much better off than it had been under Saddam), but this would be due to the natural fecundity of life itself, not to any policy decisions. The survivors would pick up the pieces, cobble together a new life from the rubble, start having children, and gradually the war would fade away into the passing generations. The window of opportunity when policy decisions mattered had long since shut; a discontinuity in history had been reached, and now it was all up to nature.

I shrugged and began to think of it like this: “One of the things that wars inevitable do is to promote cultural exchange. There wouldn’t be so many Vietnamese immigrants in America today (the child of one such couple is one of my best friends), and a Vietnamese restaurant in every shopping center, if we had not fought a war in that country. We ought to just welcome the refugees from Iraq, and I can look forward to some aromatic tobacco and good falafel.”

What I mean to say is, it seems we could have achieved equality of result in Iraq If we had simply butchered and bolted, laid waste to the country’s economy, and dispatched a small interdictory force to watch over things while the locals rebuilt. We would have incurred the moral censure of the world, but it would have blown over in a few years (for fickle mankind is always ready to forget), and it would not have given the Left a McGuffen for 5 years’ worth of skeptical press coverage with which to beat up the Bush administration.

We might not be looking at a President Obama today if that had happened, and the situation in Iraq would be no different. Perhaps this is the ultimate indictment of Rumsfeld’s Defense Department and of modern precision warfare in general: it turns warcraft into too dainty a matter. It’s best to just rock-and-roll and then get the hell out. It does far less damage in the long run.

Lab Rats: A case against Animal Experimentation

2009-05-28T01:58:00.005-06:00

A rather obvious yet novel thought occurred to me several weeks ago that actually gave me considerable pause. In fact, it’s so obvious that it’s incredibly easy to overlook it (at least I had, until now); but it’s one of those simple notions that, if proven correct, has the power to affect radical realignments in one’s worldview.

I had never before any reason to consider myself opposed to medical experimentation on animals. While I am opposed to certain directions in biological research on principle (such as genetic modification), that is because I believe the research to be wrongheaded and dangerous, not because I believe it violates the rights or integrity of the animal. There are many other instances of animal testing (such as anatomical studies, clinical drug trials, and toxicology tests) to which I would raise no principled objection.

Many contemporary philosophers have spun off elaborate theories of animal rights, mostly making use of some sort of utilitarian analysis. I will not bother to refute those theories here, but suffice it to say that they produce far more heat than light and need not be taken seriously. Animals do not have rights. They do not belong by nature to the community of rational beings to which the concept of rights pertains, and therefore it is categorically impossible to transgress against them. While cruelty to animals is indicative of a coarse and wicked nature in the man who practices it, even the meanest sort of animal abuse cannot be said to constitute a crime. No argument against animal testing made on those grounds can expect to stand very long.

On the other hand, the use of animals (as food, as raw materials, as traction, etc.) is entirely licit, for all of creation is ordered to the good of humanity. Animal experiments undertaken for the purpose of enhancing our repository of medical knowledge would seem to be included in the proper concept of use. In fact, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “Medical and scientific experimentation on animals is a morally acceptable practice if it remains within reasonable limits and contributes to caring for or saving human lives.” (Cf. CCC 2417)

But it occurred to me that, by framing the debate entirely in terms of animal rights (and the extent, existence, or nonexistence thereof), we are missing an important dimension of the problem. The issue is not whether animal dignity is being violated by experimentation, but whether human dignity is being debased by a too-ready comparison of the human body with animal flesh. In other words, the more we use lab rats as human analogs, the more we begin to see human beings as glorified lab rats.

This has an important bearing on many of the divisive medical-ethical issues of our time, such as contraception, abortion, cloning, and embryonic stem cell research. More, it extends beyond these to encompass even the most mundane matters of medical practice. Let us take but a single example: Contraception (namely, the “birth control pill”).

The discovery of hormones must have been a complicated and messy process, the final result of which was the understanding that minute amounts of certain chemical messengers were needed to regulate, among other things, the physiological processes of ovulation, conception, and gestation. In order to make these discoveries, many animal experiments needed to be done. Animals were surgically mutilated. Animals and their parts were ground up and put through various chemical fractioning mechanisms. The resulting fractions were injected into other animals and the results catalogued. Finally, these chemicals were synthesized and incorporated into medications, and these too were tested on animals. Is there anyone who believes that the methods employed here did not influence the researchers’ objectives? After realizing their capacity to manipulate animal life at a fundamental level, how could they then not turn their eye to the manipulation of human life as though it were some vast experiment?

I submit that this is exactly how our culture came to embrace the techniques of hormonal contraception, true fruit of the eugenics movement and its concomitant social dysfunctions. Before one can begin to contemplate such things, the human body must be reduced to mere material, to a set of endocrinological processes considered apart from their integration into a person. From there, it is but a small step to eliminating the person entirely from the field of view, and to looking upon the processes themselves as key. With that, self-styled elites rise up who would fain manage the glandular output of humanity in accordance with “scientific” social ends. I doubt not that many a modern liberal looks upon third-worlders, inner-city minorities, and teenagers as “bundles of hormones” upon whom they would lavish contraception in the belief that it would improve their condition, or perhaps even as mere entertainment.

There are some who would object to this, saying (and presuming for argument’s sake that we all believe contraception to be wrong) that the step from animal testing to human implementation is not obvious, and that there is somewhere a moral barrier that has broken down. I disagree, for metaphysics and epistemology precedes morality in the order of understanding. If we cannot define what a person is, we cannot know when we are doing right or wrong by him. Martin Heidegger once wrote that the Nazi Holocaust was the result of the application of the principles of modern agronomy to the problems of population management. Many would consider this a cop-out, but I happen to think his was one of the few analyses that actually addressed the hidden dimension of the problem. It was not only morality that failed, but method. The perfect cure requires not only a good will towards one’s neighbor, but “releasement” from the thought-forms of modernity, under the auspices of which we have no neighbor, but only social atoms.

Animal testing has contributed to this epistemic catastrophe. Perhaps it therefore ought to be reconsidered. I still maintain that this is a novel approach to the question, even though the idea of human beings as pitiful lab rats is a familiar enough trope in modern social satire. Hitherto we have been using those images as mere metaphors. The novelty is the shocking understanding that the metaphor has now become the literal truth.

More on Weigel and Bottum

2009-05-11T19:22:00.007-06:00

The most recent episode of EWTN’s The World Over Live featured a long segment (more than half the program, actually) dedicated to the memory of Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. Joseph Bottum and George Weigel, respectively the new captain and quartermaster of Neuhaus’ literary legacy, First Things magazine, were present as honored guests. Ostensibly the topic under consideration was American Babylon, Neuhaus’ final and posthumously publish book; but that book, being as it was a collection of previously published essays and retrospectives spanning a long career of cultural commentary, readily induces a Talmudic caste of mind in literary men already wont to offer their opinions at the slightest provocation, and under its influence the discussion eventually uncoiled into a mishmash of philosophical abstractions and rococo-maudlin bizarrerie. Central to their meandering parley was the concept of tension as experienced by one who affirms both a Christian and an American identity, out of the fiery depths of which Fr. Neuhaus believed it was possible to forge an optimal version of human existence.

I’ll admit that over the last few days I’ve begun to think that some of my recent criticisms of Fr. Neuhaus were unduly harsh. Such a beloved figure, a man so universally admired and appreciated, and here I was, an upstart like me, daring to flaunt my misgivings about him when I’m sure I couldn’t hold a candle to his knowledge, to say nothing of his years of service! Just who did I think I was? When I heard that Fr. Neuhaus was to be the subject of the next broadcast, I made a point of watching the program with the express purpose of gathering material to refute my earlier point of view, arming myself for what I was certain must needs be a grandiloquent and publicly delivered mea culpa. The material never came, however. I emerged from the viewing experience with the unwelcome conviction that in essence my criticisms had been just. Neuhaus’ conception of America as an “almost chosen nation” (at least as it was presented by Weigel and Bottum) seemed like a heady idea to me, flush with the lusty rat-a-tat-tats of a Henry Steele Commager and even the sappy panegyrics of a Walt Whitman. This is all fine in the main, I suppose; but any attempt to weave together the threads of America’s self-conceived political destiny with the substance of the believer’s identity in Christ strikes me as an ill-advised compromise, for the simple reason that it tends to prevent the very thing it is trying to achieve: the right ordering of loyalties and the proper love of one’s country.

Now, my own thinking on the matter remains, I hope, decidedly unchallenging to the plain sense of Scripture: love the Lord your God with your whole heart, mind, soul, and strength (and your neighbor as yourself), and then you will be able to love your country as you would love your mother—that is, as the concrete being who nurtured you and to whom you owe a special kind of allegiance—without getting too persnickety about the details of its interior constitution. The chimerical association of America with Christianity, implying in this case that the country founded on a strong commitment to the free expression of ideas also functions as a particularly good, if not unique, vessel for the attainment of Christian culture—in short everything implied by that alarming theme of almost chosenness—makes continuous threats to destroy my happy hamlet with its uncomfortable admixture of political desirables and religious passion; but that is not how Weigel and Bottum see things. I can almost imagine them quoting with glassy-eyed satisfaction that all too often misused line of Chesterton’s, viz. “America is the only nation with the soul of a church,” without mentioning that, viewed in context, Chesterton makes it quite clear that he in no wise considered this to be an unmitigated advantage. Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote more extensively on the subject, was of the same opinion. In comparison with these two great figures (and especially with the latter), as renowned as they are for their wisdom and foresight, Weigel and Bottum seem to be crippled by a very unhealthy attachment to the present moment and its transient debates. A hermeneutic of American exceptionalism and culture warriorship permeates their analysis of theological questions, creating in my mind the suspicion that, perhaps without expressly willing it, they would nevertheless see the Church and all her transcendent treasures pressed merely into the service of some more passing temporal agenda. I will have more to say below about why this occurs and how to correct it; but first I wish to sketch my impressions of the personal demeanors of these two men, for character is revealed in the physiognomy much more than in the words, and thus we will have a better indication of just who it is we’re dealing with.

Concerning George Weigel I have spoken before. The overriding visual impression he gives is that of an oaf. Large, protruding ears frame a neotenous face topped by a tuft of thickish black hair. All in all, he reminds me of nothing so much as the textureless, milk-fed suburbanite specimens I chanced to meet during my days at engineering school. But these slight physical limitations would have been easily overcome by the presence of a winning personality; however, it is in this very respect that Weigel falls decidedly flat. His preferred style of discourse is to drone on in monotone while leaning over the desk, raising the volume of his voice in order to win out in those awkward moments when two speakers are vying for the conversational space. There is a relaxed, overly self-confident slurring and sputtering quality to his speech, as if what he had to say were so important that he need not trouble himself to form actual words; his mere telepathic prowess is sufficient to drive concepts home into the listener’s head. Weigel belongs solidly in the neoconservative wing of the Catholic lay commentariat, having always been a defender of the Iraq War, of religious liberties, and of Vatican II (and “the spirit of Vatican II,” whatever that means). In fact, he’s just the sort of person who would feel very much at home in the WASP establishment; only the Protestant “P” doesn’t apply in his case and “WASC” is not nearly so tidy an acronym. He is perhaps best known for his massive book Witness to Hope: The Biography of John Paul II. Such book I am tempted to deride as hagiographic, but one must puzzle over the irony of using “hagiography” as a term of derision when the subject of the book will in fact be canonized someday. The point at present is that it is an overly fawning, one-sided, and heavily processed account that alters the Pope’s views to make them conform to George Weigel’s preexistent political and theological conceptions. In writing it so, Weigel was simply following his larger pattern of presenting Catholic doctrine as if it were justification for his neoconservative outlook; and I suspect it is the latter wherein he has stored up his real treasures.

Joseph (AKA “Jody”) Bottum is an odd sort of fellow, to say the least. A mop of wiry brown hair sits like a wig atop his beady-eyed face, lending him an uptight countenance reminiscent of the character actor Jeffrey Jones. He speaks in long, hastily composed paragraphs that tend to wander around the topic like the incomputable geodesics of some verbal n-body problem. In this, he displays a tin ear for the cadences appropriate to televised conversation—in which dialogue must be kept pithy and wit is superior to exposition—which is tantamount to a lack of conversational shame: he seems unaware of the fact that the time he takes to tell a story is incommensurate with the value of the story he tells. There was a repetitious quality to his speech as well: familiar words, atavisms, and chunks of thought recycled from earlier passages kept sewing their way into his patchwork explanations, padding their length and confusing their content. In the midst of one particularly lengthy excursion, the camera could be seen cutting back to World Over Live host Raymond Arroyo, who was growing visibly agitated and anxious to wrest control back from the interminably verbose Mr. Bottum. To crown these interesting developments, once Bottum had satisfied himself that his lecture was over, he settled into his chair with a look of contentment and cocked his left arm back like a cobra, drawing his hand up to his shoulder in what I took to be his characteristic gesture of completion.

The low point of their discussion occurred after a caller enquired about the wisdom of advancing a constitutional amendment proclaiming Christ the King. What the caller’s actual question was we shall never know, for he was cut off in mid-sentence by Raymond Arroyo, who was no doubt feeling very squeezed for time after already enduring several of Bottum’s bottomless disquisitions. Weigel spoke “to the issue,” saying (in paraphrase) that “Fr. Neuhaus would have been steadfastly against any such proposal. It is unadvisable to grant congress the authority to declare the kingship of Christ in even a social or a metaphorical sense, for a legislature that had such authority could also do very unsavory things with it, like proclaiming, oh, Oprah Winfrey as queen. It is best to keep the state out of the church’s business; the arrangement hit upon by America is a pretty good way of doing things, and Fr. Neuhaus was keen on preserving it.”

What kind of men behave thus? What kind of men, when faced with the (admittedly hypothetical) opportunity of getting one of the tenants of their faith written into statutory law, respond by abrogating it in favor of some jejune concept of liberty and political minimalism? Not exactly men who have placed both body and soul in the service of their beliefs. It is one thing to understand that the church and the state have fundamentally different roles and that, for many practical purposes, they ought to stay out of one another’s way. It is quite another thing to say that liberty trumps truth in the political arena. A strong commitment to liberty becomes, in every question of gravity, simply a commitment to self-negation. If you’re going to believe in something, it is necessary to fight for it, to bring it to expression using whatever means present themselves (including political means), and to take the inevitable setbacks and tragedies as the price of doing business in a fallen world. The Oprah analogy sets up a false dichotomy: Weigel has abandoned the possibility of a concrete victory for the illusion of a security bought by keeping metaphysical questions underneath the government’s radar; but it is not enough to refuse to claim the scepter and to hope that no one else does so. If we do not fight for Christ, than Oprah may end up as queen anyway—by default, and unresisted. We are not far from that situation now.

Towards the end of the program, Weigel expressed some disquietude about the manner in which the Obama administration has justified its stance on the sanctity‑of‑life issues so important for the functioning of our society, not to mention dear to the heart of God and to the hearts of His people. In effect, the administration has been saying “We understand your concerns and we respect them, but we’re going to proceed with [say, funding embryonic stem-cell research] anyway.” Weigel says that we’ve never dealt with an opponent like this before: someone who listens to our objections, but then simply dismisses them with a smile and a pat on the head. May I suggest to Mr. Weigel that this is precisely what comes from disregarding the use of political tactics in the service of Church ends? Obama does this because he knows he can: the only army that can stop him has decided that fighting is passé. The Christian of today need not wonder idly what it must have been like to join the crusades like his ancestors did of old, for there are plenty of crusades to be fought right now; but much of the Church, including the episcopacy, has foregone the use of politics to achieve what it desires, because it doesn’t fall into line with the modern day notions of religion as a matter of conscience and the church as a Community of Nice People.

What has happened to the Church today? What does it need, really, to be revitalized? I submit that it needs fewer spokesmen like Weigel and Bottum. Religious culture is a vast topic—far to vast to tackle in a short essay—but the crux of the matter is that we moderns have lost any sense of what religion actually is. It has become intellectualized, bowdlerized, and most perniciously, laicized out of all contact with truth and reality. It is the laicizing tendency which I mean to address here. What gives Weigel and Bottum the authority to discourse as they do? Neither one of them has been ordained; neither one of them follows the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience. It is inevitable that profit motives and personal hobbyhorses figure into their theological triangulations. The vulgarization of the teaching function that properly belongs to holy offices has spread the message too thin and caused it to lose coherence, such that the community of believers can no longer be said to be “of one mind.” In fact, the Church has lost its character as a church, becoming merely an umbrella organization for a hodgepodge of disconsonant verities.

The apostolic priesthood was instituted in part to help combat this natural tendency, but as the power of the laity has increased, that of the priesthood has decreased. This is not to say that the mind of Christ, as it is communicated to us in the person of the priest, is no longer respected anymore, for that would simply be restating the ascendancy of the laity; it is to say that the priests, all too often, no longer communicate the mind of Christ. They have become excessively accommodating to a shadow Magisterium consisting mainly of laypersons—parish committees, diocesan bureaucracies, and secular intellectuals like Weigel and Bottum—who are well able to extort concessions from the Church due to the latter’s lack of political heft.

Truly addressing this problem will require us to completely reorganize how we think about religion in the context of modern life. It is important to remember that the individual members of the priesthood have been called out of the lay state and into a higher order of being. The priesthood is an estate, a vocation, a metaphysical reality that brings with it graces, powers, and responsibilities that simply aren’t accessible to the layperson. The priest is a jewel that must be placed in a proper setting, treated with respect and veneration by the entire society. It is they who should be delivering the decisive word on all matters of truth and faith. But this requires, in turn, that they elevate themselves to the dignity that their office demands, and begin to rule the cultural landscape with clarity and firmness. The laity, on the other hand, is much better served by being solidly under the care of a worthy priest than by attempting to make theological determinations for itself. The priest is the hand by which the layman grasps God, and is much more dependable than the fickle mind of man, beset by worldly cares. The best way for a layperson to come close to God is to cultivate strong sacramental and devotional practices, and commit himself to work and to family life. In this way, religion begins to work its way into the bloodstream, becoming a matter of culture and habit, and a sure guide to virtue. For the laymen who is not called to a special religious status, religion is best learned in the context of the family; which, formed under the hand of a holy priesthood, becomes the seedbed of future priests. Thus the religious and lay states support each other on their pilgrimage through this world.

It is true that certain laypeople, like St. Catherine of Sienna, have done work that none of the ordained clergy dared to do, and rose to become great doctors of the faith. But this was precisely because the Church was in a state of confusion at the time. When no priest can be found to do the work, God will raise up whomever is willing. I have described here the ordinary way of leading a religiously informed life, the sure way, the way most conducive to peace and harmony, the way that is gentlest on the human frame. It is not the way of the broadsides that so inflame contemporary discussion. It does not stand in need of commentary, and the subscription rates are decidedly cheap.

Worms

2009-05-10T21:05:00.005-06:00

It's raining here in Denver tonight; a welcome divergence from last year's Spring, which saw almost no rain at all. I was just now observing the earthworms crawling around in my yard, escaping to the surface after a rainstorm, as is their wont.

Several competing hypotheses have been advanced to explain this curious behavior. The first holds that rainwater percolating through the soil becomes enriched in carbon dioxide from the respiration of soil microorganisms. The carbon dioxide dissolves in the water, creating carbonic acid which the worms find irritating. But since the immediate soil surface pH is not likely to differ markedly from that just underneath the surface, this theory appears to me largely discredited.

A second, popularly held notion has it that the worms rise to the surface to breath, since the subterranean tunnels they would otherwise inhabit have become waterlogged by the rains, causing them to drown if they remain below. This too seems rather implausible to me. Earthworms do not have lungs; they breath by gaseous diffusion directly through their skin. They can in fact survive quite comfortably under water, provided the quantity of dissolved oxygen is sufficient to maintain cellular respiration. It's possible that, during a heavy thunderstorm, the in-falling rainwater displaces enough of the soil's natural porosity to render the air supply inadequate; but it's raining very lightly tonight, and in the highly aerated upper soil regions where they live, this seems an unlikely possibility.

The third hypothesis states that the worms are drawn out by the rhythmic vibrations of the raindrops impacting the soil. This is no doubt an atavistic trait shared with their cousins, Shai-Hulud, the great desert sandworms of Arrakis. But seriously, professional worm harvesters (yes, there is such a thing) regularly employ vibrations to lure worms from their underground hiding places. This is accomplished by wriggling a garden rake or other multi-pronged instrument against the ground. A good worm hunter can gather an entire bucket of worms in a few hours this way, without a single drop of rain having fallen.

But there still remains to be explained why the worms behave in this fashion. I believe they are simply taking advantage of the wet conditions in order to get out of the house and move around for a while. Worms die quickly if they are exposed to sunlight or dry conditions. Thus, a nice damp night is the perfect time to hit the town, scout out some new territory, and scope out the ladies. Well, earthworms are hermaphroditic, so they can't really avoid finding the ladies; but then again, they can't avoid finding the gentlemen, either. All they have to worry about is finding another worm. This androgynous sex life ensures that mating opportunities are frequent, if not exactly enjoyable by our standards.

When we look at life in its simpler manifestations, we see how little it differs from the inorganic processes of geochemistry. The worm doesn't merely inhabit the soil; it is the soil, modulated and stabilized into this form by long eons of experience. The worm's boundless appetite for leaf litter and clay particles, its impressive faculty of digestion, its slow, dream-like pulsations propelling it through the abyss of night, these are nothing more than the mighty rotations of the earth, the timeless beating of wind and rain upon the rocks, the deep and pregnant rumblings of the planet that thrust up the mountain ranges and cleave the ocean basins, all intensified and focused and united into a gestalt. A will speaks forth out of the bare earth, a will to exist and to eat, a will to mate with like flesh and perpetuate the form. It bespeaks of a cosmic mind impelling the unfolding of the world through endless ages of ages. Soil has found a voice, and that voice says "I am Worm."

Each one of these miserable lives is a microcosm of creation, with drama and tragedy of its own. They are wasted by the millions, they go down like stalks of wheat before the thresher, but they endure. In this we see the way of all flesh: Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Every living organism, every plant and animal and single cell, is a seed planted by the Creator in the deep structure of existence, destined to arise and bear fruit at its appointed time, and then to yield itself up to eternity. Out of this churning mass springs forth the frame of nature, painfully beautiful and severe. The flesh has its requirements; it must do what it must do. But all things are ennobled by the struggle, and we need only play our roles and play them well.

The human race is unique, for here mere flesh is elevated to the rank of spiritual dignity. In the Incarnation we learn that God himself has received our flesh into His heavenly abode, and in turn imparted us with something of His own nature. Our bodies, dust though they are, will nevertheless accompany our souls into eternity. Humanity is the bridge between heaven and earth, at once the crown of nature and the dwelling place of nature's God. Could it possibly be otherwise? The abstractions of philosophers, the force-gods of the pagans, these lend no hope for man as such in eternity. Salvation could only come, has come, through the Son of Man. Without Him we are nothing but weak worms of the dust.

Just take my word for it, and never mind that wikipedia article.

Bodies and Souls

2009-05-08T15:16:00.005-06:00

Edward Feser's most recent blog post is called Act and Potency; well worth the reading. The comments section has generated a couple of questions which I actually dared to try and answer. I hope Feser doesn't mind; and I hope his own answer, when it comes, will in some sense corroborate mine, so I'll know that I'm headed in the right direction. There were two questions I tackled in my post, the relevant portions of which I'll reproduce here. First up, the poster "Crude" asks:

I do have one question. How does this approach work when it comes to, say, genetically modifying plants or animals? For instance, there are rabbits that have been genetically modified to glow in the dark. Would this be in its own unique class /not 'filed' here? Would it be a first potentiality (assuming such a modification could be made while the creature is still living)? Something else?

Meanwhile, a little futher down the thread, Chen-Song asks:

Hi Professor Feser, thanks for another interesting post. I have a similar question to Crude, but even more far-reaching. For the genetic modification of rabbits, what if the rabbits are modified (say with human DNA) such that they can think like humans? I know that in this case the rabbit probably can't be called "rabbit" anymore, and is some sort of chimera, but how can that be explained in terms of act/potency?

There is a related issue I ran into a while ago: Someone posed a thought experiment about a dead brainless corpse getting fitted with a brain by a mad scientist. If the "mad science" works and the corpse is alive and thinking again, does that mean the brainless corpse had the potential to be alive? Or did the potential really somehow belong to the transplanted brain?

I have responded as follows:

Crude and Chen-Song,

Here's my two cents. Firstly, by inserting a gene into a rabbit's genome that causes it to glow in the dark (or inserting the Bt gene into a corn plant to make it pest-resistant, or whatever), we have simply appended an "accident" to its essential being. It is not really any different than receiving a tattoo or ingesting an oral fungicide; it's just accomplished using a more round-about method.

This is one good reason why genetic reductionism simply will not work. My genome is no more "essential" to me than my left arm. The disruption of my genome would be akin to the amputation of a limb: undesirable yes, but powerless to effect my essential being.

I think the confusion arises from three sources. First, the presence of an intact and functioning genome is necessary for the developmental actualization of every organism. A defect in this regard leads to rather obvious disfigurements and diseases, so it's easy to elide the distinction between "essential being" and "intact genome" if we are not fortified against this error by the rejection of genetic reductionism.

Second, because the processes of molecular biology occur beneath our level of sensory awareness and most of it is unknown to us, we imagine it to be some sort of black box which we mistakenly equate with the unseen three dimensional figures who cause the shadows to move in Plato's cave. This is what we might call "incomplete idealism."

Third, the hyped media reports of the successes achieved in genetic engineering play to the deep-seated Cartesionism with which we moderns are all infected, leading us to believe that intrinsic changes were wrought in the essential beings of plants and animals when in fact no such thing has occured. We must take the time to untangle the philosophy and the methodology of these cases before simply accepting the truth value of such statements as "Scientists Unlock the Secret of Aggressive Behavior," or some other such nonsense.

As for human-animal chimeras, the basic hylemorphic position is that human cells, or human DNA, integrated into the organism of a rabbit would subsist virtually in the rabbit, and hence would be 100% part of the rabbit not part of any human. If rabbits, or some other animal, were refitted with human brains, this would not suffice to make them rational animals; they would still be mere animals sporting human tissue.

In order to understand the case of the corpse, let's change the organs in the thought experiment. A heartless corpse certainly has the potential to live again if it received a timely heart transplant. Does the potential exist in the transplanted heart or in the heartless body? Actually it exists in neither, but only in the substantial form "human being," which requires a certain minimally intact body to actualize itself. The heart in question need not even be an organic heart, but might be a mechanical prosthesis. The same could be said of the brain. Some type of organ or device is needed to govern the body's basic metabolic and endocrinological functions so that it does not succumb to disintegration, but this need not be a brain as we usually understand the term. Thinking, on the other hand, is an activity that belongs to the soul, not to the brain. The basic fallacy here is the Cartesian notion that the brain is the ghost in the machine, the seat of consciousness inhabiting otherwise inert matter.

We would do well to remember here Leibniz's admonishment that human beings are not really born and do not really die. Their souls are created by God to be the rational form of their bodies,and are multiplied as bodies are mulitplied; but the soul remains immortal once created, is seperated from the body at death, and will one day be reunited to it. The body is "alive" only by virtue of the soul and not through some mysterious power of its own.

More torture at What's Wrong with the World

2009-05-07T11:59:00.004-06:00

Jeff Martin (Maximos) at What's Wrong with the World believes the political right is careening into Unseen Chasms of Perdition over the waterboarding issue. I have begged to differ:

Maximos,

It seems to me you employ a great deal of purple prose in order to lay out a very simple thesis: so-called "social conservatives" are leaving the political right over the torture issue. When stated so simply, is the thesis true? Is it relevant? Does it make any difference?

I answer "no" to all the above. Anyone who would abandon genuine conservatism, the great treasury of tradition and metaphysical verity, over something as minor as this, must not understand what conservatism is really about; and must, frankly, have been looking for an excuse to leave. Sorry, I don't buy the "torture pushed me out of the party" line; nor do I believe that waterboarding and abortion are similar enough to warrant mutual inclusion under the generic heading, "dignity of life issues."

But if the social conservatives whom you speak about are so concerned about eliminating both - fine. Let them leave the political right. Let them become conservative Democrats, if that's their fancy. They will enjoy the company of Colin Powell, Scott McClellan, and Christopher Buckley; but I wouldn't expect even vestigial traces of their erstwhile conservatism to survive for very long in that acid bath.

Should the political right really care if they go? Should they fear the diminished (and doubtful, and at any rate temporary) probability of electoral success that may result from not having these clowns in the party? Not at all. We stand for a body of truth and ideas that we proclaim both in season and out of season; truths that will ultimately carry the day because they issue from the wellspring of life itself.

By all means, go off and enjoy it. Comfort yourselves with the nostrum that you've rigorously adhered to principle (we all know it was just an expedient for expressing sour grapes). The political right will still be here when your little fad has run out of gas. We'll even take you back when you come to your senses. We'll be more than happy to overlook your transgressions and restore your reputation. We're like that; we're the forgiving sort.

Open letter to Mark Shea (quoted from What's Wrong with the World)

2009-05-04T14:28:00.005-06:00

I now see that our redoubtable Mark Shea has tried to mix it up with Dr. Feser himself at What's Wrong with the World. Here is my latest letter to him, as quoted from that site.

Mark Shea wrote:

"I was quite sincere in my apology, as I am in my understanding that you seem to be completely baffled about what torture is. I'm sorry you refuse to grant forgiveness, but my conscience is quite clear so I won't worry about it any further."

If you would have confined yourself to making statements about what your own conscience tells you, then everyone would have agreed that your private opinion is quite respectable and no one would have bothered you about it. But you claim that your views are backed up by fully authoritative Church teachings, so that everyone who has a different take on the matter is either ignorant of the teachings or guilty of a sin. This is wrong. The argument made by folks like me, Dr. Feser, Francis Beckwith, and many others has met the burden of proving that the real situation is not that simple.

As you've stated above, your principle reason for banging this drum so loudly seems to be a deep-seated fear that once the state is "allowed" to torture anybody, nothing will prevent it from torturing you, your relations, practicing Christians, and anybody else whom it finds unsavory. In this you are in need not so much of a lesson in moral theology but of an awareness of Oswald Spengler's distinction between truth and facts. Positive law does not by itself restrain what an agent, and especially a state, is able to do. If it did, there would be no crimes, no criminals, no treaty violations, no political revolutions, no regime changes, not now or ever. We would all live in Immanuel Kant's republic, which, through the perfection of reason, is suitable even for devils. The reality is that while positive law places de jure restrictions on the behavior of individuals and governments, their de facto capabilities are limited by nothing but the exhaustion of their power. To make a long story short, a proscription against "torture," as you define it, would in no wise prevent it from happening anyway, as you must admit if you believe both A) That the U.S. has tortured detainees and B) That the Church, federal law, and international law has already forbidden this. In other words, you are in danger of that which you fear. There is a certain irreducible risk that you will suffer torture in this life no matter what anybody has to say about it. Welcome to the Valley of Tears.

By the way, I've noticed that you've made some attempt to refine your style when dealing with a worthy opponent like Dr. Feser. You were rather less kind to me on your blog, as I've taken care to document. Apparently you think I am someone who can be dismissed with nothing more than cheap rhetoric and slander, someone to whom it is not necessary to afford even the pretense of a charitable argument. I shall not forget that, and I will take appropriate measures should I need to correspond with you in the future.

Now, changing the subject. For a definition that can distinguish between the normative and non-normative uses of the word "torture," I propose something like the following: Torture (the intrinsically immoral kind) occurs whenever the subject suffers or has reason to fear the arbitrary use of power directed against him, or power directed against him incommensurate with his crimes. This obviously includes all cases wherein the punisher does not have the lawful authority to inflict the punishment. It also includes any sort of sadistic abuse doled out for the sake of thrills. It precludes any claim of torture on the part of a guilty person, so long as there is positive law stipulating what sort of punishments may be meted out for what offenses, and if the punishment was administered accordingly.

I've always been fond of Frank Herbert's dictum, "Thou shalt not disfigure the soul." It seems to sum up the thrust of all genuine morality rather nicely, and could be useful as a practical rule of thumb for both diagnosing crime and assigning punishment.

Waxing Personal

2009-05-02T20:00:00.008-06:00

My friend Hans at The Long View, engaged as we are in a discussion about the definition and merits of conservatism, was very kind to ask me about myself:

If you don't mind a personal question, do you have a family (i.e. wife and children)?

No, I certainly don't mind a personal question. Actually, I'm glad you asked. Sometimes waxing personal is the only way to explain oneself.

I do not have a wife or children, nor would I be able to care for any in my current circumstances (hopefully soon I will). I'm 28 years old and I live sparingly, finally trying to finish up a university degree, the first half of which was spread out over 10 years and 3 different institutions.

I realize that many of the opinions I've expressed here these last two years may seem to have little to distinguish them from adolescent anarchism, but there are some reasons for that.

1. No doubt some if it was adolescent anarchism, and even I won't stand by everything I've ever written.

2. Since most of my learning is the product of my own undirected reading, it lacks both the adjustment that would have resulted from application to real-life situations and the refinement born of a scholarly atmosphere. I admit I get very emotional about these things.

3. Finally and most importantly, it would seem that, due to my station in life, much of the debate regarding the finer points of culture, politics, and economics, including much of the discussion occuring here at The Long View, is taking place at a level that is "over my head," so to speak. I mean by this not that it is beyond my comprehension, but that it seldom reaches down to effect me personally. I'm watching a battle between titans, and my opinion is really little more than a bet placed on which titan will win. I may win or lose the bet, but either way I was not really a part of the battle.

This sense of anomie no doubt accounts for much of my cynicism regarding contemporary culture. I don't really belong to it, after all. Nevertheless, my reasons for making my "bets" remain entirely genuine. Sure, there is also the desire to show myself approved, to show how smart I can be, to prove that I have honed my skills as a cultural critic and diagnostician, perhaps even one day ascending to the level of the formidable John Reilly! But there is also the fact that I really do care about the world, and that may yet triumph over all. Even the dogs may eat of the crumbs that fall from the children's table.

This goes to your point about Solzhenitsyn. I am a knight, but a poor one. An unhorsed knight lacking steed or armor, defending with self-deprecation an inner nobility that I cannot outwardly display. Although I may slip into contemporary idioms from time to time, although a wild temptation may occasionally spur me to "take up sides" in some partisan debate (especially when I'm earnestly trying to understand it), my opinions come directly from the heart. I shill for nobody, and I harbor little respect for those who do, even if by coincidence I happen to agree with them.

****************

Hans, speaking of Solzhenitsyn, also had this to say:

That is the position of a true fighter for justice. Unfortunately, conservative politics now seem to be where left politics were in the 70s - people don't care about ethics and truth any more, it's all about spin and positioning.

I will try to correct this for you by doing my best to live and to fight as an honest conservative; more, as an honest Catholic. You are right to demand as much.

Getting bashed by Mark Shea

2009-05-01T02:15:00.005-06:00

Mark Shea, a prolific and well-known Catholic author and a man I erstwhile admired, has for some strange reason decided to slander me in a recent post on his blog after I politely disagreed with him regarding America's treatment of detainees captured while prosecuting the War on Terror. Mark insists that these detainees have been tortured, and further insists that such torture is always and everywhere wrong, and actively condemned by the teaching magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church. As many of you know who have been following Mark's blog, he has been banging away at this with impressive frequency for quite some time. His responses to commentators who present reasonable and well-argued criticisms of his views have not always been gentlemanly, as the following post will show.

This dust-up started when I posted what I took to be a polite, mild opposition to Mark’s views on torture (and the applicability of the Church’s teachings regarding torture to the current circumstances), in which I pointed out that Fr. Sirico of The Acton Institute was on the record disagreeing with Mark’s stated position. The exchange that followed between Mark, myself, and several other followers of his blog is indicative, I believe, a rather narrow and uncharitable caste of mind on their part. Mark himself acted in a manner ill befitting a public figure of his stature. I have collated and annotated that exchange, and attempted to reproduce it here in as logical an order as possible, consisting as it does of various comments and quotations strewn throughout several posts on Mr. Shea’s website, to which I will provide links so that they may be viewed in context. First up, my original comment to Mark which occasioned the exchange:

Hello Mr. Shea,

I have seen you perform as Innocent Smith on EWTN, and I belong to my local Chesterton society (Denver). I've just started coming to your blog and perusing your quite extensive and informative writings, so I regret that my first comment here must be one of mild opposition.

While I fully agree with the statements made about the political divide within the Church, abortion and punitive interrogation practices do not share a parity of wrongness. I have a few brief words to say about this torture debate which I hope will help settle the issue.

First of all, it is all only rumor and gossip at this point. Nobody accept the prisoners and the interrogators know what really happened inside those prisons, and there is no wisdom in everybody going off half cocked.

Secondly, I was very pleased to see that Fr. Sirico of The Acton Institute granted an interview on EWTN's The World Over Live last Friday night in which he refused to condemn waterboarding as torture. Fr. Sirico recognizes that any statement of his which denounced Bush & Co. as being in violation of the moral law would be seen as him lending his pastoral support to a certain pacifist interpretation of Catholic social doctrine, which would not only hinder our country in dealing with its foreign policy challenges, but would throw fuel on the flames of a partisan divide such that the side least likely to advance a genuine moral agenda would reap the net advantage. This conflict is dividing the Church, sadly, into many subversive or misguidedly pacifist Catholics on one side, many pseudo-tough Mel Gibson-like "conservative" Catholic charlatans on the other, with hotheads on each side arrogantly approriating for themselves the title of "magisterium of the day." Since my concern is for the integrity of the Church, the leavening of the world, and the protection of the country (in that order), I can only applaud Fr. Sirico's suave handling of the question, in which he effectively told the blogosphere to "mind its own business."

To simultaneously insist upon the broadest definition of torture and the strictest application of moral proscriptions against it, during a time of war, accomplishes little more than the emboldening of enemies abroad, fifth columnists at home, and other less sordid political opposition in the opinion pages of the world. No state could function under that kind of scrutiny, which raises in my mind the suspicion that those who demand the impossible from the state are motivated not by the pure desire to see it conform to the image of Christ, but by some benighted instinct that the the entire eartly order of things is somehow ipso facto illegitimate. This cannot be squared with any proper understanding of Catholic social doctrine, but it remains a constant temptation within the religious life of man, for those who misunderstand the statement "my kingdom is not of this world."

End of first Letter.

To this rather innocuous dissention Mark Shea decided to respond with a slanderous post, not in the comment boxes, but on his regular blog, in which he both grossly misrepresented my positions and accused me of certain grave sins against the Church. The name of that post is Boy, do I get sick of having to say the same stuff over and over. Well Mark, nobody said you had to say anything. Did I strike a nerve, perhaps? The complete post, including his quotations of me, is reproduced below:

A reader wries:

Hello Mr. Shea,

Hi!

I have seen you perform as Innocent Smith on EWTN, and I belong to my local Chesterton society (Denver). I've just started coming to your blog and perusing your quite extensive and informative writings, so I regret that my first comment here must be one of mild opposition.

Your regret is nothing compared to mine, now that I've read what you have to say.

While I fully agree with the statements made about the political divide within the Church, abortion and punitive interrogation practices do not share a parity of wrongness. I have a few brief words to say about this torture debate which I hope will help settle the issue.

A) I do not claim a "parity of wrongness". I think such attempts to parse "which grave evil is more evil" debates are fruitless and stupid. I simply point out that Holy Mother Church tells us in Veritatis Splendor and in the Catechism that both torture (what you call "punitive interrogation techniques") and abortion are gravely and intrinsically evil. That's why we are instructed:

"In carrying out investigations, the regulation against the use of torture, even in the case of serious crimes, must be strictly observed: 'Christ's disciple refuses every recourse to such methods, which nothing could justify and in which the dignity of man is as much debased in his torturer as in the torturer's victim'. International juridical instruments concerning human rights correctly indicate a prohibition against torture as a principle which cannot be contravened under any circumstances." -- Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, n 404

The internal quotation is from the 15 June 1982 address to the International Committee of the Red Cross by Pope John Paul II (available in French and Italian at vatican.va).

First of all, it is all only rumor and gossip at this point. Nobody accept the prisoners and the interrogators know what really happened inside those prisons, and there is no wisdom in everybody going off half cocked.

No. It is not. It is abundantly documented fact, including (but by no means limited to) pictures of corpses, reliable accounts of how they got to be corpses (and of Administration protections for the CIA interrogator who tortured the victim to death), as well as documentaries chronicling horrors inflicted on prisoners.

Secondly, I was very pleased to see that Fr. Sirico of The Acton Institute granted an interview on EWTN's The World Over Live last Friday night in which he refused to condemn waterboarding as torture. Fr. Sirico recognizes that any statement of his which denounced Bush & Co. as being in violation of the moral law would be seen as him lending his pastoral support to a certain pacifist interpretation of Catholic social doctrine, which would not only hinder our country in dealing with its foreign policy challenges, but would throw fuel on the flames of a partisan divide such that the side least likely to advance a genuine moral agenda would reap the net advantage.

If that is what Fr. Sirico said, and if EWTN lets it go unchallenged, then shame on them. This is an elaboration of Peg Noonan's counsel to simply ignore grave evil. A refusal to condemn waterboarding as torture is not a quibble about definitions: it is participation in an obvious and grave evil. We have *executed* soldiers from other countries who waterboarded people. It's a preposterous falsehood to say that it's impossible to know if waterboarding somebody 183 times is torture. Tom Kreitzberg summarizes the ridiculous incoherence of Fr. Sirico's reported argument this way:

"I don't understand. Is the idea that Fr. Sirico thinks Bush & Co. violated the moral law, but he won't say so because that would make pacifists happy? Or that he doesn't think they violated the moral law, but he won't say so because of... some other reason? Or that he hasn't formed an opinion, because if he did then it might make pacifists happy?

"And whatever it is, this is very pleasing and applause-worthy?"

I hope somebody at EWTN wakes up.

This conflict is dividing the Church, sadly, into many subversive or misguidedly pacifist Catholics on one side, many pseudo-tough Mel Gibson-like "conservative" Catholic charlatans on the other, with hotheads on each side arrogantly approriating for themselves the title of "magisterium of the day." Since my concern is for the integrity of the Church, the leavening of the world, and the protection of the country (in that order), I can only applaud Fr. Sirico's suave handling of the question, in which he effectively told the blogosphere to "mind its own business."

This, being translated, appears to mean "Don't listen to the Magisterium, listen to Fr. Sirico." Here's the thing: Fr. Sirico's disastrous attempt to paper over grave and intrinsic evil (and your attempt to anoint that opinion as the Last Word of Holy Mother Church) is *exactly* describable as "'conservative' Catholic charlatans .... arrogantly approriating for themselves the title of 'magisterium of the day.'" The real Catholic Magisterium clearly teaches that torture is intrinsically and gravely immoral. Common international law (including US law), has treated waterboarding (among other tortures authorized by the Bush Administration) as torture. We even hanged people for it.

To simultaneously insist upon the broadest definition of torture and the strictest application of moral proscriptions against it, during a time of war, accomplishes little more than the emboldening of enemies abroad, fifth columnists at home, and other less sordid political opposition in the opinion pages of the world.

Actually, I have not insisted on the broadest definition of torture. I have typically confined my discussions to examples of torture which nobody in his five wits can deny are torture, such as waterboarding, cold cells, and strappado--all of them authorized by Bush. As to the rest of your argument, it basically means "People who authorize war crimes are above the law if I happen to approve of the war" or, more briefly, "Ignore the Church's teaching in ius in bello."

No state could function under that kind of scrutiny, which raises in my mind the suspicion that those who demand the impossible from the state are motivated not by the pure desire to see it conform to the image of Christ, but by some benighted instinct that the the entire eartly order of things is somehow ipso facto illegitimate. This cannot be squared with any proper understanding of Catholic social doctrine, but it remains a constant temptation within the religious life of man, for those who misunderstand the statement "my kingdom is not of this world."

And we finish with the sotto voce suggestion that "If you don't support war crimes, you may be an enemy of America" and the blasphemous invocation of Jesus as being all in favor of covering up grave evil.

Since you are a Chestertonian, try contemplating some of these sayings:We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right. What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong.

[Note: Mark here proceeds to quote G. K. Chesterton to me, but I will omit those quotations for the present. He resumes his invictive against me by plainly stating that I meant something other than what I said.]

Oh! Says the torture defender, "Did I say 'punitive'? I meant "enhanced". We aren't doing this to punish, but purely to obtain information".

[Finally, he outright accuses me of betraying the Lord Jesus.]

Here's your 30 pieces of silver.

End of Mark Shea's response.

Obviously I could not let this slander stand unchallenged, so wrote back once again to correct this injustice:

Hello again Mr. Shea,

I agree with the sentiments expressed by poster Jeff above. If you feel like you are saying the same things over and over again, that may be because my comments were filtered into some preexistent perceptual category of yours to which you have a readymade response. As it stands, the straw man you attacked in your rather heated blog post directed against me has little to do with my actual arguments. You seem to think you know exactly what I am really saying and why I am saying it, but I will not allow words to be put into my mouth. I was not rude to you; I did nothing to merit such animosity. I respectfully disagreed with you while expressing admiration for your work and showing due deference to your blog and your opinions. Now I will take my stand against this slander.

MS: ”A) I do not claim a "parity of wrongness". I think such attempts to parse "which grave evil is more evil" debates are fruitless and stupid. I simply point out that Holy Mother Church tells us in Veritatis Splendor and in the Catechism that both torture (what you call "punitive interrogation techniques") and abortion are gravely and intrinsically evil.”

Actually, you did claim a parity of wrongness here in your post An Interesting Letter from North of the Border. You said: “…We can even manage that much without placing, as core values at the heart of our various parties, some practice or idea that is directly repugnant to natural law and revelation. With the Dems, it's the sacrament of abortion. With the Rubber Hose Right, it has become the sacrament of torture.”

Furthermore, such debates are by no means fruitless and stupid. I do not want to reprise the entire history of moral reasoning on this subject here, but suffice it to say that waterboarding a known terrorist strikes many people as somewhat less gravely disordered than murdering an unborn child. If you disagree with such people, that’s fine; but they are expressing a visceral response, hardly uncommon to basic humanity, deserving of thoughtful consideration, not dismissal as “fruitless and stupid.”

Finally, I have read Veritatis Splendor 80, and I don’t see that it has much to do with the matter under consideration. The portion of that document upon which you continuously rest your case (actually a quotation from Guadium et Spes) does not apply here. The fundamental question under consideration is sovereignty, not morality. The right to administer punishment, up to and including capital punishment, is a right that belongs intrinsically to any justly constituted authority and cannot be rescinded. It is not moral to tell the state that it cannot act like a state; Augustine, Aquinas, Bellarmine, Suarez, and other thinkers of the “just war” tradition have said as much.

MS: ”If that is what Fr. Sirico said, and if EWTN lets it go unchallenged, then shame on them. This is an elaboration of Peg Noonan's counsel to simply ignore grave evil. A refusal to condemn waterboarding as torture is not a quibble about definitions: it is participation in an obvious and grave evil.”

To be fair, Fr. Sirico also said that the Church’s default position is always to do no harm, but he was unwilling to apply the default position in this case. I believe he did so because he knew that A) we were talking about a sovereign act of war, not sadistic torturing for thrills, and B) he knew that strong condemnation of the practice at such a juncture would be interpreted as a political act in itself (a rather unhelpful one) as I have explained.

MS: ”This, being translated, appears to mean ‘Don't listen to the Magisterium, listen to Fr. Sirico.’”

That’s not at all what it means, and you know better than that. This is pure misrepresentation. I said that I agreed with Fr. Sirico’s handling of the situation; I did not impute any infallibility to his opinion. But while we’re on the subject, you would do well to remember that he is in fact a priest, and deserving of a bit more respect from you. But more importantly, you have accused me of saying “don’t listen to the Magisterium.” In effect, you have accused me of heresy. That is a very foul thing to do, and in this case wholly unjustified.

MS: ”Here's the thing: Fr. Sirico's disastrous attempt to paper over grave and intrinsic evil (and your attempt to anoint that opinion as the Last Word of Holy Mother Church)…”

I made no such attempt.

MS: “As to the rest of your argument, it basically means "People who authorize war crimes are above the law if I happen to approve of the war" or, more briefly, "Ignore the Church's teaching in ius in bello."”

My arguments are arguments about the nature of sovereign authority; they have nothing to do with whether or not I am personally in favor of the war. As it so happens, I was opposed to the Iraq war from the beginning on the grounds that it was financial ruinous, to which my postings on numerous internet fora will attest.

MS: “And we finish with the sotto voce suggestion that "If you don't support war crimes, you may be an enemy of America" and the blasphemous invocation of Jesus as being all in favor of covering up grave evil.”

This is ridiculous.

1. I am saying nothing of the kind.
2. I am not arguing specifically for America’s interests in the present conflict, but for America’s sovereignty.
3. Don’t ever accuse me of blasphemy again.
4. Would you not admit the possibility that Christ’s words are, from time to time, misinterpreted?

MS: ”One of the "vivid calculations of remote events" that should occupy the mind of every Catholic (and especially every Chestertonian) is what happens after you grant Caesar the power to torture people whom he regards as "extremists".”

But Caesar has the power to torture people whom he regards as extremists. No one needs to grant it to him. That’s why he’s Caesar, and he can do with his spoils what he will. Caesar stands at the pinnacle of earthy authority, and there is no merely temporal power outside of himself to check his directives. He must hold his decisions before his own conscience. That is that gravity and tragedy of being Caesar.

MS: ”Oh! Says the torture defender, "Did I say 'punitive'? I meant "enhanced". We aren't doing this to punish, but purely to obtain information".”

No, I said punitive and I meant punitive. Punishment is not inherently evil, as you seem to think.

MS: “Here's your 30 pieces of silver.”

As I said, never accuse me of blasphemy or heresy again.

End of my second response.

This all generated quite a firestorm of controversy on Shea's blog. The poster Jeremy asks me this:

Mr. Beck,
I infer from your reasoning that a state actor need not take moral considerations into account, only questions of sovereignty. Is that accurate?

To which I responded with the following post:

Jeremy,

A state actor can and should take moral considerations into account, of course; but his freedom to act in accordance with what he believes to be in the best interests of the state should not be frustrated by temporal subordinates, whether these be courts, churches, or opposing political factions. Otherwise he is not a state actor at all, but subject, at least in part, to the will of these other bodies.

In every historical struggle of parliament against king the cry goes up that monarchy is pernicious, liberty must prevail, that the will of the people must be heard, and that merit should rule. But in fact, monarchy remains the sole legitimate and metaphysically preordained form of government, and the defenders of liberty want not to do away with it, but simply to exercise the monarchical powers for themselves. Governance has only one nature. Power is power; nothing changes that. This truth was brought to the high pitch of expression during the English Revolution when Oliver Cromwell proclaimed that "history has abolished the very name of king," but proceeded to act autocratically himself as Lord Protector.

Magnanimity requires strength; peace requires justice; liberty requires that the political culture of nation be "in form." Those who militate against, not this or that ruler, but order itself (the terrorists in this case) have committed the crime of high treason. They have forfeited their claim upon the mercy and beneficence of society. The just response to their behavior is that they be publicly and painfully put to death, although society may forgo its right to administer this justice if it considers it expedient not to. But to tell a state that it "doesn't have the right" to punish treason with death is to impugn its dignity as a state, and ultimately is a betrayal of all those who have sworn her allegiance or sought her protection.

This can not be moral. Not only is it not moral, it is dishonorable. It forces innocent victims to acquiesce in the suffering of wrongs without the possibility of redress. Human beings were not made for this sort of slavish existence. The very purpose of government, the very meaning behind the vesting of authority, is to serve as a bulwark against the possibility of ultimate dishonor. The state is the incarnation of justice on earth; he who rules, rules with permission of Almighty God and will render an account to Him. True, human rulers are very frail, and power is often abused, but the state as such must continue to exist. The alternative is mere slavery and darkness.

End of my third response.

This too failed to quiet my accusers, so I called upon the venerable Dr. Edward Feser to help me with my fourth and final reply:

As for the rest of you gentlemen, I will point out that Professor Edward Feser has written a series of three long blog posts treating of the legitimacy of the Iraq War in terms of traditional Just War theory, in which he incidentally examines the treatment of prisoners taken by us in that conflict. Here is the link to the second part, from which I quote the following relevant passages:

"There is also the question of how the U.S. has treated prisoners of war, though, and here many have alleged that the methods of interrogation that have been used are intrinsically immoral. Now there have undoubtedly been individual cases where prisoners have been unjustly abused. But that is bound to happen in any war to some extent, just as it is bound to happen in police work, and by itself it no more de-legitimizes the war as a whole than the occasional corrupt cop casts doubt on the legitimacy of having a police force. What really matters is whether the methods officially approved of and widely practiced are on the whole unjust.

"Here again, it seems clear that the tradition and the manuals support the conclusion that there is no violation of just war criteria. To be sure, the manuals – or at least the ones I have seen – do not specifically address the question of how prisoners of war may be interrogated. But they do nevertheless have much to say that is relevant, particularly in their treatment of the question of how ordinary criminals can legitimately be dealt with.

"So, for example, McHugh and Callan explicitly rule out “torture” as a legitimate way of punishing evildoers, and give as examples of torture “rack, thumb-screw, prolonged scourgings, etc.” (vol. II, p. 130). But they also allow that such “bodily harms” as “wounds, blows, restraint” and even “branding” are permissible as punishments for people known to be guilty of serious wrongdoing, as long as they are administered on “sufficient authority” (such as that of the state), for a “sufficient reason” (such as the “good of the public”), and so long as there is “moderation in the harm or pain inflicted” (pp. 129-130). Similarly, “mutilation is lawful by public authority in punishment of a criminal; for if the state has the right to inflict death for serious crime, much more has it the right to inflict the lesser punishment of mutilation” (p. 127). In short, while torture is always wrong, the manuals allow that under the right conditions such punishments as wounds, blows, restraint, and even branding and mutilation do not count as torture.

"Along the same lines, Prümmer’s Handbook of Moral Theology says that “since the State has the power to put the criminal to death, so it has the power for a sufficient reason to mutilate the criminal (v.g. by cutting off his hand) or to flog him” (p. 126). And Jone tells us that “corporal chastisement is lawful if done by, or with (at least tacit) consent of, competent superiors. Public authorities have this power over malefactors, as also parents over their children” (p. 144)

"If spanking a child can be morally permissible, then, it is hardly plausible to suggest that there is anything intrinsically immoral or contrary to human dignity in, say, slapping a known terrorist. And while my point here is certainly not to defend any particular case of alleged mistreatment of prisoners – much less to recommend the likes of mutilation, branding, or amputation as methods of interrogation – the manuals do clearly suggest that if a certain prisoner (Khalid Shaikh Mohammed or Saddam Hussein, say) is known to have engaged in seriously immoral behavior (e.g. terrorism or mass murder), then it can be justifiable to use rough methods in dealing with him. It is no good, then, piously to condemn as “torture” or as “violations of human dignity” the methods the U.S. has used in interrogating terrorists, since what counts as “torture” is part of what is at issue. And clearly, the tradition and the manuals, while sometimes condemning torture, also sometimes allow that some very harsh punishments indeed fall outside the scope of torture.

"It might still be objected that whether or not certain methods are intrinsically immoral, they ought not to be used because they are incompatible with the Geneva Conventions, or with some other international standard of lawful wartime conduct. But while the manuals hold that such international agreements ought in general to be respected, they also allow that “if they are repudiated by one side, they cease to bind the other, unless they are the subject of Natural law and justice” (Davis, p. 149; cf. also Fagothey, p. 578 ). In regard to reprisals against those who have committed acts that violate international law, McHugh and Callan hold that “if the act of the enemy is opposed only to international law [and not the natural law], it is not unlawful to use the same act against him, for, since he has broken faith, the treaty obligation no longer binds the other side” (vol. I, p. 573 ). Insofar as the tactics used by terrorists are violations of international law, then (not to mention the natural law), the United States has, according to the teaching of the manuals, no moral obligation to respect standards of international law in dealing with them (though of course it does have an obligation to respect the natural law)."

End of my last response.

Part One, Part Two, and Part Three of Edward Feser's essay on Just War theory are here provided for your reading pleasure. All who are interested in the legality of the Iraq War or American interrogation techniques are highly encouraged to take a look at them.

More on Spengler's move to First Things

2009-04-24T23:44:00.007-06:00

My friend Hans from John Reilly's site has raised an issue with my original post concerning David P. Goldman's (AKA Spengler's) move to First Things. I have quoted his comments here, and my response follows below them.

Hans wrote:

Why call it "conservatism", then? If the word is to mean something, it is about conserving a status, or elements thereof that are seen as desirable, and for doing that, you need to know the status, its meaning, and what the alternatives are, and why they are worse. Otherwise, it's just fear of the unknown masked as a worldview. Knowledge and innocence aren't good bedfellows. Any meaningful conservatism is a position for adults, not for little children.

1. Concerning the question, "Why call it conservatism?"

Fair enough. We don't have to call it conservatism if you don't want to; it's only that this is what most regular self-identifying conservatives actually mean by the term. It's what they desire from the movement in the first place. If the emblem underneath which they rally has been drained of this simple content (and many would agree that it has), then they may well begin calling themselves something else. A new match-strike moniker has yet to be found, however.

2. Concerning the statement, "Any meaningful conservatism is a position for adults, not for little children."

But in that case it would die out with the adults, and would ultimately conserve nothing. I don't think Goldman would agree with you here, at least not with words; but his actions agree with you rather nicely, and that disaprity goes right to the heart of my criticism of him.

Goldman's major trope during his "Spengler" years was that culture is a sort of cross-generational social contract. Conservatism is not only something fit for little children, it is for the children and about the children. He was right about all this. The values that conservatives espouse are always ordered to the continuity of hearth and home, family and race. Children sense the intrinsic value of their cultural myths and are eager to see their strictures enforced. Furthermore, it is not quite correct to assert that conservatism is fundamentally about conserving a "status." The basic thrust of the Burkean position is that the living tradition ought not to be defiled. Things must change and grow, but they should do so on the basis of that which has already proved itself reliable, incorporating new possibilities into the body politic in a way that nourishes rather than poisons it. In these and other ways, conservatism is mainly a doctrine of applied common sense.

Goldman gave his intellectual assent to all this, but his knowledge never trickled down far enough to effect the mode of his living. Or of it did so, it was only in a purely outward and mechanical way: his perfunctory reversion to Judaism, for example. If you asked him how exactly his mature embrace of "tradition" has helped him or anyone else, I don't think he could provide you with an answer that would hold water. I doubt not that he really believes, of course - I would not accuse a man of sacrilege - but he believes that which he has justified for himself. There is something theatrical about a piety that says, "I recognize that cultures with a strong sense of the transcendent survive and endure; therefore, I will believe in God." It's like joining the victorious army after the battle has been won. A faith worth having is seldom acquired so painlessly.

Fr. Neuhaus is a different story. He was by all accounts brilliant and entirely devout. I've been poring over the Neuhaus archive in an effort to familiarize myself with the man, and I fully agree with that assesment. I find very little to disagree with in the plain text of his thought. It's just that I find his life wholly uninspiring. As badly as I feel speaking ill of such a one, I cannot shake off my frustration with someone who seemed to "know everything" but was content merely to write about it. Writing is not enough. It's said that as an informal advisor to President Bush, he was among the 25 most influential evangelicals in America. I don't doubt that he was, but the Bush era was not exactly a sterling success for Catholic principles, so the influence seems not to have yielded much fruit.

I have said it before, and I'll continue saying it for as long as I draw breath. What Goldman and Neuhaus are doing isn't really wrong, but it is an extravagence the efficacy of which is quite overrated. The faith doesn't need any more editors. It doesn't need comfortable moderns who also happen to be Catholic. It needs adherents in spirit and truth. It's enough already with "engaging the culture" - which probably could have been Fr. Neuhaus' personal motto. Engaging the culture has produced nothing but lukewarm Catholics. Principled disengagement from the culture is the only response today worthy of men. The sooner we recognize this the better.

The Asia Times Spengler moves to First Things

2009-04-24T00:18:00.003-06:00

Asia Times pseudonymous columnist "Spengler" has self-identified as David P. Goldman. And he is moving...to First Things?

I'm afraid I can't approve of this development at all. Spengler was sometimes interesting to read, but he was never the sort of balanced thinker whose analysis I would feel comfortable taking to the bank. His metaphysics was materialistic, his historical outlook whiggish, his sociology crass, his foreign policy dubious, and his commitment to Israel fanatical. This is hardly the sort of person to be heading up a periodical "whose purpose is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society." (link)

Whether or not this move injures the reputation of that magazine is not my concern. I am more disturbed by the tacit assumption that a man like Goldman somehow "belongs" in this guise, as if his were the views that the conservative and/or religiously-minded intelligentsia wants reflected back to them. Something rigid and ruthlessly urbane, some House of Usher-like morbidity, has crept into the minds of these self-styled guardians of culture. What exactly do they think they're guarding? The deteriorating remnants of bourgeois respectability? The lie of a necessary existence for them in the present, wrapped up in the lie of a happy past? Goldman mentions the friendship of George Weigel in his autobiographical piece. If he and the interminably monotone Mr. Weigel are the new voices of intellectual conservatism in this country, I can only say, in the words of Samuel Goldwyn, "Gentlemen, include me out!"

I have further reasons for mistrusting Goldman's bona fides. No one who has truly absorbed the soul of Western instrumental music could possibly settle into a career as an economist, basta finito; however, musically inclined sidemen like Alan Greenspan have been known to become great economy-wreckers, and I suspect something similar has happened in Goldman's case. We look in vain for any evidence that a swinging sense of melody has animated his public life. He lacks the gaiety, the rhythmic pulse and pound of the cavalry charge, retaining only the frozen syllogisms of game theory. He has probably read Godel Escher Bach. He probably agrees.

While we're on the subject, I'm not sure that a similar charge doesn't lay against the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus. I'm not very familiar with the voluminous writings of Fr. Neuhaus; having been a Catholic for only a little over a year, I'm still picking up the threads of what passes for Catholic intellectual culture in this country, but what I've gleaned from him in summation (thanks in no small part to John Reilly's recent review) hasn't endeared him to me. Like Goldman, he seems to value the church primarily as a means of cultural preservation. The real religion playing before the inner eye of such men is the autonomous machinery of Whig history, not the heavenly city of St. Augustine.

Something entirely new is needed in conservatism, something that avoids both the curatorial neocon mandarins like Goldman and the First Things crew, and the snarky pharisaism and hypocrisy of Thomas Fleming & Co. over at Chronicles. There must be a truly innocent conservatism: unselfconsciously faithful, forgetful of self, eschewing all worldly compromises. Wall Street mavens, furrow-browed grumps, and "literary men" will have no inheritance therein. The future belongs only to those who come into the faith as little children, not to the worldly wise men who give the polite congé to God.

The Sick Man of the West; Libertarianism as Ornament, Part II; Exasperations and Ideas

2009-04-07T19:21:00.008-06:00

I’d like to begin by apologizing to my regular readers—both of them—for my recent neglect of my blog. About a week and a half ago my computer came down with a hijacker virus that worked its way deep into the registry, the remedying of which required a complete system rebuild. Consequently I have been unable to do any word processing or to post any new material. Furthermore, I was at the time cut off from my primary source of information concerning world events—the internet—as I steadfastly refuse to watch the cable news networks. Fortunately, my system is now squeaky clean and back to normal. I’d like to thank Mark Jenkins for his tech assistance. Readers in the Denver area suffering from computer malfunctions may contact him if they wish; but he is rather pricey, so caveat emptor.

* * *

Here’s something interesting to ponder: I’ve noticed that both The Daily Reckoning, that highly libertarian-leaning contrarian economic newsletter, and Taki’s Magazine, a motley collection of far-right and libertarian viewpoints edited by Taki Theodoracopulos, have recently made serious revisions to their comments policies. Taki has disabled readers’ comments altogether, while the Daily Reckoning has ditched its phpBB-powered forum engine in favor of a much more heavily moderated comments section beneath each individual article.

Now, the reasons for these changes remain unknown to the present author, but speculation (my own) has it that it must have something to do with the behavior of people likely to visit these websites, and the nature of the comments left scatted…er, scattered, about them by same. The DR forum was a notoriously ill-mannered, ill-tempered, foul-mouthed free-for-all seemingly overran by police-state paranoiacs and 9-11 conspiracy theorists. Seldom did they speak about matters economical. Seldom did they speak rationally at all. Arguing with them was to no avail, as they preferred a style of verbal ruthlessness and a self-imposed hierarchy of prestige based on the number of postings attained by each member. In full keeping with the host magazine’s laissez-faire philosophy, the forum went unmoderated and evidently un-perused by anyone with a responsible stake in the reputation of the venture. The result was a predictable phalanx of worldliness—a sort of brothel of the intellect—whose component parts quickly closed ranks when challenged, lest any ray of truth should penetrate into their dark recesses.

Similarly, Taki’s Magazine is a known hang-out for the seedier elements of the ideological spectrum. Least execrable among them are the Buchananite foreign policy conservatives, who actually have many important points to make; but coming close on their heels is the bizarre neo-racism of Steve Sailor, and the ramblings of disenfranchised pseudo-Catholic (I will not say sedevacantist) writers who affect a Franco-like braggadocio in an effort to rise above the realms of perpetual dorkdom to which fate has apparently confined them. Taki himself is always principally concerned to write about his jet-setting lifestyle and various sexual exploits, to what end I’m not sure I understand. Much of the content of the site seemed artificial, off-color, and neurotic; the comments section was a gallery of strange specimens rendered in wax, applauding the deliberate inversion of common sense with the all the vicarious ferocity of the jilted.

This is worth mentioning in order to illustrate that the ideas expressed in such places are incapable of realization in the actual world, and that the followings they attract are composed of the very people least able to survive without the very social order which they never miss an opportunity to attack. How is it, for instance, that the anarchists and conspiracy theorists on the DR forum could have missed the implication that any government capable of planning and executing the 9-11 attacks in the manner they envision—deeply insinuating itself into local law enforcement, air traffic control, world financial markets, information streams, and the mass media—could also easily see what was being written on the forum, and could surely silence the self-styled Paul Reveres with ruthless efficiency? Do they think they are too important to be terminated? Too close to the truth, perhaps? Would their sudden disappearance bring forth a wave of skepticism and revolution? Surely not! Their very existence is sustained by America’s tradition of constitutionally limited government and our respect for the freedom of speech: a respect so deeply engrained that we suffer our government to be maligned with insane accusations rather than trespass the rights of the accuser.

Taki’s immoderate lifestyle, too, is equally sustained by those who do not practice it. An invisible honeycomb woven of the personal and professional integrity of others forms the scaffolding that supports his life of dissipation; and to all his pretenses to “aristocratic” values, courtly love, licensed womanizing and what not, I can only say this: While many noble men have been imperfect spouses, it belongs to the essence of nobility to at least desire, at some point in time, to be loyal to one’s consort and one’s word, to undertake the hard challenges of standing ground and not giving up. Every good thing that there is—whether it be a person, a family, a piece of property, an enterprise, or a nation—exists only because somebody purchased it with the sacrifice of their life’s blood. We were all born helpless, and somebody cared for us. Every true marriage, every attempt to start a business, every deep claim of ownership laid against a person or against the earth’s resourcefulness, has something impossible about it. It is a pure metaphysical reality that must struggle to incarnate amidst a world of chaos and accidents. To undertake this struggle and to face it with all one’s might is the very heart of honor. It is care, and care alone, that makes the world. What has Taki ever cared about?

* * *

Since I have been back online, I have learned that North Korea has launched its ballistic missile, and that President Barack Obama has embarrassed us in high fashion at the G20 summit. The overall behavior of the president and his administration are so horrifying that they quite escape my capacity for intelligent commentary. I am often left sputtering in wordless exasperation; but there comes a point in time when I must do my part, however small, to add to the spate of voices weighing against our present circumstances, and to do so with fearlessness and prophetic urgency. Therefore, I must not abjure the posting of political commentary, which should begin to appear on this site on a semi-regular basis. Also, readers who have been patiently awaiting my review of G. K. Chesterton’s Manalive will not be disappointed. My recent tech issues have temporarily interrupted my ability to work, but the piece is already half-written, and I ought to have it posted at least before the next meeting of The Denver Chesterton Society on April 20th. I will list below some of the other projects and ideas I’m working on for this space, and readers are also welcome to commission their own.

1) A serial commentary on some of the basics of the Catholic faith, including the Ten Commandments, the Virtues, and the Mysteries of the Rosary.

2) An essay relating the meaning of hypocrisy to the definition of mortal sin.

3) A review of the Vatican II documents, beginning with Dei Verbum.

4) A post on some of the metaphysical traits present in the writings of Oswald Spengler.

5) Reviews and/or expositions of the writings of Monsignor Romano Guardini, including The Lord and The End of the Modern World.

6) An essay on “the noble nature” and its need for a modern resurgence.

7) An introductory—we might say exploratory—piece on practical ethics and the necessity of becoming better pagans so that we may become better Christians.

Of course, I’ll be struck by new ideas every day. Some of these posts may not appear, and wholly others may take their place, but this much is certain: as these issues are near and dear to my heart, everything I meant to express in the enumerated posts above will end up being said anyway, perhaps fragmentarily and under other titles. Again, if anyone has a question they would like to see treated, or would care to see an exposition of some particular aspect of faith or philosophy, please let me know. I like work.

Once Upon a Time in Mexico

2009-03-30T01:24:00.005-06:00

"Is there any way to know what's really going on in Mexico?" asks Wretchard. Matt Beck opines with the following:

"Perhaps some useful information may be gleaned from watching the currency exchange rates and the commodity price indices in Mexico. It would be even more useful to watch Mexican leading economic indicators like trade patterns and orders, but these are probably well-doctored and well-laundered in order to conceal corruption, and we simply don’t have the economic intelligence-gathering apparatus. The exchange rates and indices, however, are public information, and to the discriminating eye might offer grist for analysis. Once we factor into account the effects of official changes in Mexican monetary policy, any discrepancies will serve as a rough indicator of the degree of leverage exerted by non-state actors.

"Should the peso strengthen relative to the dollar without a rise in commodities prices, it probably means the situation isn’t that bad. In that case, remittances are likely to be steady and the level of corruption tolerable. Should the peso strengthen and commodities rise, that means aid is being back-channeled to Mexico and corruption is on the march. If the peso weakens however, we know that the dollar influx has dried up and the Mexican fief is firmly in the hands of a narco-diocletian keiretsu. The hyperinflation of Mexican money will be the most obvious outward sign that something is wrong."

North Korea as the Pan-Asian Osgiliath; The Two Small Clouds of Lord Kelvin

2009-03-30T01:01:00.006-06:00

A little background on this posting. Wretchard over at the Belmont Club compiles these meditations about North Korea's upcoming missile launch and America's response to it (or lack thereof), in which he cites this Voice of America article which quotes Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as saying the following:

I think if we had an aberrant missile, one that was headed for Hawaii or something like that, we might consider [intercepting it], but I do not think we have any plans to do anything like that at this point.

I had to blink twice to make sure I read this correctly. Robert Gates, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, said that if an aberrant missile were heading for Hawaii (one of the 50 states, for those of you who went to the Hillary Rodham Clinton School of Geography), we might consider shooting it down? This is outrageous. A lack of moral conviction of this magnitude ought to be grounds for dismissal. Perhaps Gates himself already foresees that the whole thing won’t be his problem very much longer.

On the larger subject, the lack of political will to deal harshly with North Korea is an ossified feature of the post-war geopolitical order which probably will not change until many other things do as well. Uncorking the malice behind the DMZ would be ruinous to millions unless America was prepared to militarily defend South Korea and Japan, which would mean an air-and-sea battle with China over the surrounding oceans. This scenario would quickly escalate into WWIII; and although it may perhaps be inevitable at some point, it could be prudent to defer it for now.

The resulting stalemate has enabled the Kim Dynasty to achieve something very few ever have: the successful resistance of encroachment by Western world powers. For this reason alone does the regime still enjoy the support of its longsuffering subjects. For this reason alone is it tolerated by the Chinese and even the Russians. It functions as a garrison of hope for Maoist sentiment; a sort of pan-Asian Osgiliath arrayed against the forces of the West. Implicitly, we know (and they know) that we cannot take North Korea without taking the continent, which is impossible.

Therefore, North Korea is a purely symbolic, not a strategic, thorn in our side. The U.S. has no strategic interests on the Korean peninsula any longer; but, like the “two small clouds” of Lord Kelvin, it represents a recalcitrant lump in our otherwise smoothly functioning imperium. The conflict is ideological in nature, and we all know what happened when those two small clouds were investigated.

Gained in Translation

2009-03-23T23:14:00.009-06:00

The account of how God confused the tongues of man at Babel tells us, as its primary object lesson, of a punishment for hubris. Man had endeavored too arrogantly to reach heaven by his own labors; and God, seeing as how the entire race was united in this conceited purpose, forthwith confused his language so that no such projects would again be possible for him. Thus we learn what folly it is to gratify ourselves with monuments to our own greatness. The choice of punishments in this case was not arbitrary, for it was primarily the unity of man’s speech—and his consequent inability to escape from the world of his own ideas—that blinded him to his creaturely status. Locked away safely in his castle of thoughts and words, man, in an unfortunate partaking of the pride of Satan, began to feel himself as a power; and no longer did he think he owed any deference to those eternal things which his Creator had established for his own good. Man’s disrespect for an appropriate pathos of distance, his wanton attempt to violate the sanctity of God’s heaven, brought down this humiliation upon himself: that no longer could he claim a share in the free and easy company of his brethren. Forever confused of purpose, forever wary of his fellows, he would now draw swords against himself, and rend with desperation his own flesh. It was a second Fall: a second exile from that communion for which he was made and which alone can make him happy. At Eden he had lost his God, and now he had lost his friends. Alone and broken, with nowhere to lay his head, what now was man to do?

God’s mercy had not forsaken him. It is said of God that He always gives back with His right hand whatever He has taken away with His left. Therefore we are justified in seeking out a deeper meaning in the confusion of tongues, in the transformative power of which we may glimpse, at the center of it all, the depth of His loving concern for His little ones. It is not far to seek, for we have ourselves already given the clue: God has severed us from those who were our partners in hubris, so that we may find each other again in charity and humility. Without the unity of language to spellbind us in a web of common delusion, we are forced to see one another as creatures in need of assistance. In other words, we are obliged to recognize the truth about ourselves. The Lord works in mysterious ways.

It is a good exercise to watch the peoples of foreign lands going about their daily business. In this way, we get some sense of how we ourselves must appear before foreigners, and an inkling of how we all must appear before God. When we do not speak the language or understand the customs of the folks whom we are observing, we remain outside whatever particular cultural spell obtains over their land, and we behold them in their basic humanity: gregarious, ignorant, often cowardly, and forever fascinated with the petty and the absurd. But in beholding them thus, there awakens in us also a deep sense of compassion. This is the compassion of the saints, the holy men and women of God’s elect, before whose penetrating eyes for truth even their own countrymen appear as naked newborns. We men will also recognize it as the passion with which we have always loved women (a passion which seeks to remedy a need, but intends no disrespect), when the beauty and receptivity of such a one causes us to rise from our bed of bestial slumber and awaken to a sense of husbandly care. “I stand for her: For her I will exist,” it says (for existence is simply the Latin word for ‘standing out’). Both these loves, the compassionate and the husbandly, feel a real sense of anxiety for the wellbeing of their beloved. Both intend nothing less than her perfection, and both are ready in a stitch to risk everything for her safety. There comes now an irrepressible desire to enter in to what we have found, to descend (if I may use that term) into the world of the beloved. Just so did God empty Himself of His glory and was pleased to dwell among us as a man, therefore to perfect our redemption and bring to us the fullness of holiness.

How great was the disappointment in hell at this turn of events! How infuriated the demons must have been when they realized this had been His plan all along! They had thought to mar God’s finest handiwork; to introduce a poison into the bloodstream of His beloved sons and daughters that would be a sickness unto death for them, and an everlasting triumph of rebellion flung in the face of Him. But this was not to be. In an act at once so astonishing and yet so simple in its purity as to be worthy of the King of Kings, God abided the travails of man until the appointed time had arrived. Then a knowing wink was exchanged among the Persons of the Trinity, and this decree went forth from the high throne: “Now I myself will go down to complete what I started.”

You might have heard a pin drop in heaven. “Himself,” the angels whispered to one another. “But we heard Him say that that the son of the woman would crush the serpent’s head. And did not we ourselves carry the prophecy to Isaiah that said ‘a virgin shall conceive and bear a son’? But that must mean…”

“Yes,” God answered. “I am to be born as a man. In my own image were they created, and now I will take my place among them in expiation for their sins.” The glory of God, which the angels had always beheld according to their own abilities, was at that moment magnified and deepened by an incalculable amount. Something about the work they had been performing for numberless ages was now revealed to them which they had never imagined before. God was preparing to enter the world; to bring his creatures into perfect and intimate communion with Himself. From that moment on, all estrangement was ended as heaven and earth interpenetrated one another in love, not hubris. The uplifted wood of the cross took the place of the mud-and-straw towers by which man had labored to reach his lost Lord: grace after grace descended freely from the mighty turrets, and soul after soul was lifted upwards to enhance the joys of eternity.

But God’s healing will for man was still not exhausted. Not only did he mean to restore us to Himself, but to reunite us in community with each other. The enmity between man and man resulting from the confusion of languages, which was the fruit of Babel, was to be mended by living in accordance with the Beatitudes, the language of love itself. Here is that charity and humility which transforms men into partners in salvation rather than confederates in crime; or worse, mutual victims in a never-ending turnabout of violence. In the context of our discussion, the charity wrought by Christ teaches us to see every man in his essential humanity, which collapses the old word-based categories we had previously assigned to him. The black speech of this world dissolves in the paradox of the cross, leaving the infinite value of every human being as the sole surviving truth.

Consider a teaching like “Happy those who mourn: they shall be comforted.” The mournful man is the stranger of all he meets. He tastes the full bitterness of Babel, for there are none to understand him in his pain. Extreme bereavement is an unutterable blackness: there are no words that can convey it, and no words seem to reach into it. The Christ, however, promises not only to comfort him in his suffering, but assures him that even now he is being drawn closer to God. At the same time, we who have had our hearts torn open in compassion by the love of Christ, see the mourner as our kindred spirit, and would fain take his suffering upon ourselves to the extent we are able. The community that was once destroyed by scrambled speech now has its prayers directly carried from heart to heart through its unity in Christ. And furthermore, we recognize this as being not our own love, the love we have for our fellows who really are admirable (or who, at least, really belong to us in a special way), but as the love of Christ himself, applicable especially to the stranger, the outcast, and the enemy. The reunion of man with man affected by God in Christ is far greater than anything man achieved on the basis of speech alone; for Christ came to restore to us the lost language of Eden, with the surprising corollary that, after much patience and humility, we come to recognize it at last as our own native tongue.

-Matt Beck
Faith and Courage

Two Walks through the Valley

2009-03-23T18:10:00.006-06:00

For the past eleven years, my sole surviving hometown newspaper, The Denver Post, has hosted a symposium of guest editorialists known as the Colorado Voices. I applied for inclusion in the group this time around and was rejected. I can't say I am surprised, as the paper takes a notoriously liberal point of view and I had made it clear in my cover letter that I intended to argue from a conservative and specifically Roman Catholic perspective. My two contest submissions, however, I believe to be of general interest; so what better way to take revenge on the Post than publish them here on my blog. Take that, mainstream media!

The two columns in question recount experiences had by me while walking around the local environs, observing and pondering. They are not altogether pessimistic, but they left me with the impression that Something Ought to be Done. To wit:

My first submission: In which I describe a walk taken around my neighborhood, and my meditations on the state of the children therein.

It was growing hot late one summer morning when I found myself walking along 96th Avenue just east of Federal Boulevard; a highly patched and pounded stretch of roadway surrounded by mobile home parks, and home to the very same Federal Heights Elementary School which I had attended some 20-odd years before. Clumps of children could be seen departing from there, the recipients of some summer school lunch program, I surmised. They all appeared too cynical for their tender years and not at all attired as children ought to be. Looking homeless and joyless, they scattered their separate ways. Failed social policies, I thought to myself. What on earth are these kids going home to? A pair of older girls dressed in gangster regalia walked stiffly away from me to the east; but my path headed west, toward the looming Westminster water tower and the familiar peaks of the Rocky Mountains, their grandeur diminished by the spiritual lowliness of that vantage.

By a design not my own I found myself walking abreast of one such clump, a ragamuffin trio looking orphaned on the pale sidewalk. The oldest girl seemed to be about 11, a surly creature who already had the look of a survivalist. I winced in pain when I thought of the experiences the next few years would bring her. Astride her was her younger sister, probably 8, a happier and bouncier girl about whom there was still wrapped many tendrils of childish innocence. Behind them a little boy of 3 bumbled along. Largely ignored by the others, he looked the most homeless of all; the eagerness with which he tried to keep up spoke forcefully of both tragedy and hope. He wants so badly to be relevant, I thought. I was seized with compassion, but also with the wish that I had never come that way in the first place.

It would have been too awkward to turn around now. My legs, on autopilot, had already bourn me into their midst. Not knowing what to say, not wanting to say anything at all, I simply tried to smile and be pleasant; but the younger two children were glad of my companionship. The boy entwined himself around my feet like a cat while the middle girl chattered on to me about things I cannot now recall. They clearly have no decent father-figure at home, I said to myself. It is my duty to do what I can. The older girl, though, was plainly offended that I was there. Many times along the way she drew her sister aside by the elbow, admonishing her to have nothing to do with me.

The middle girl didn’t listen. “Will you put him on your shoulders,” she said to me at last, referring to her little brother. “Sure. Come here buddy,” I said, hoisting him up. I had not gone twenty paces when I caught the acrid smell of urine: he had peed down the back of my neck. I was a gentleman about it, and said nothing to the boy or the others; I did, however, take him off my shoulders.

The eldest was getting restive, and I asked her why she disliked me. “You’re weird,” she said, “and your cologne really stinks.”

“I’m not wearing cologne,” I told her, repressing the urge to tell her what her brother smelled like. Realizing that she must have smelled my deodorant volatilizing in the summer sun, I began to wonder if anyone at her house was ever clean.

We reached the entrance to their neighborhood and the surly girl flatly informed me that I had to leave. She grabbed her sister and they departed without another word. I watched them go, for the boy was tottering along many yards behind them. Suddenly he stopped, ran back, picked a dandelion out of the median and gave it to me. I thanked him and continued to watch them all until they turned out of sight.

Later, as I was scrubbing my neck red in the shower, I did not need to wonder why God led me into such a circumstance. I was there so that a fatherless boy could give me a flower. By His grace, my heart was properly disposed that day to be Christ to him. The chief danger facing such children is not (as we imagine) the possibility of meeting a very different kind of man on the road; the danger is the godless world of despair in which they are already enveloped. “The dreadful,” said Martin Heidegger, “has already happened.” Do you know where your children are?

My second submission: In which I describe “free walking” through a prairie dog town and the meditations that follow.

There is a sport known as “free running” wherein the participants try to reimagine their relationship to urban spaces by performing acrobatics about the city’s infrastructure. I am conducive to the idea insofar as it implies a livelier inhabitation of the urban scene, but not in its postmodern implications as a form of kinetic graffiti. The first is like a kitchen garden planted in the backyard, while the second is an abandoned lot full of weeds. Can a city remain fecund without being mulched into its surroundings? To answer that, we might begin by examining how nature interacts with the city in its own terms.

To wit, I have often engaged in an activity I like to call “free walking,” which is to say that I stroll through an urban environment deliberately ignoring the strictly semiotic component of the experience while confining my attention to living forms, physical boundaries, and the forces and substances of the natural world. I have found that nature is in very truth primitive; that is, both persistent and pointless. The prairie dog towns of Thornton have been particularly instructive in this regard.

Prairie dogs always bark at interlopers like me. Thus, one of the first things you learn about them is that their separate communities all have their own local dialects. The pitch and cadence of barks vary from town to town, but are recognizably similar within a town. I have concluded from these data that each community is relatively isolated, for the asphalt roadways that divide them from one another are crossed only reluctantly and at great peril; and while the slow trickle of more adventurous prairie dogs have managed to colonize nearly every available space (right down to the medians on I-25), there remains little commerce between towns.

The attrition rates from these crossings are impressive. There is in the vicinity of 90th and Washington two small fields that I used to walk through, each one not more than a quarter acre in size, subdivided by a single two-lane road. During the summer months the death toll among prairie dogs from automobile rundowns on this road usually amounted to at least one per diem, and on one noteworthy occasion I counted six. I marveled at how these small communities could remain viable under the pressure of such repeated decimations, especially when considering that they sustain themselves on nothing more than the sparse, dry vegetation that grows thereabout. The desperate struggle of these little lives played out before my eyes: endless, tedious, immensely wasteful, devoid of all justice and proportion—animal life seemingly disclosing itself as a temporary extravagance of soil. Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

I took one of the dead creatures and laid him amongst some tall weeds where he was unlikely to be disturbed. Over the course of the next two weeks I returned to watch his final dissolution into the earth. The maggots came first. Small, translucent beings, barely visible in the beginning, they presently grew into the familiar corpulent grubs whilst consuming almost all the available meat. Black ants came next, picking over the cartilage between the joints, and finally some unidentified beetles extracted the last drops of oil seeping out of the bones. I noticed then that prairie dog incisors actually grow from the back of the jaw, like elephant tusks. I speculated on the possibility of some long-distance relationship between them while realizing that the flesh, the play of feature, everything that holds any emotional content for us, had melted away. The skeleton stood as a monument to the futility of all yearning, an empty skull beholding a cold sky.

“You want to live ‘according to nature’?,” Nietzsche mockingly asked the stoics. It was a rhetorical question designed to show the emptiness of that sentiment. Is not human life the very endeavor to be otherwise than this nature? The popular psychologists and anthropologists of the modern era have it backwards when they disregard the billions of human beings living in cities and set up the relatively few denizens of the remote jungles as somehow typical of the race. It is not in human nature to be “natural.” We need our cities and our laws as much as we need our fields and our freedom. To preserve both fecundity and order, we need the social lordship of Christ the King. A neo-pagan attachment to naturalism simply will not do.

Just ask the prairie dogs.

Libertarianism as Ornament

2009-03-20T14:46:00.004-06:00

Comment on The Long View, "The Obamarama..."

HopefulCynic68 wrote:

It's a myth that most businessmen love the free market, they're as human as anyone else and government-guaranteed profit appeals to them too.

The saccharin libertarian attitudes embraced by many business-types seem to issue not from any metaphysically-inclined picture of the workings of an ideal economy, but from the purely practical need to avoid any moral or political friction at the point of sale. The businessman cares not whether his customers are conservative or liberal, black or white, straight or gay; he simply desires as much patronage as possible. Therefore, he envelopes his market operations in an atmosphere of inclusivity, affecting for his part a studied and principled aloofness from all distinctions made on the basis of blood and history. Do not underestimate the impact these attitudes have on our contemporary sexual harassment and racial quotas policies. Multiculturalism—the deliberate attempt to obliterate the realities of creed, race, gender, and class, and to enthrone the concept of libertarian agency as the sine qua non of personhood—reveals itself here as the "politeness" of the trading floors; the theatre mask of embalmed civility that all who wish to buy or sell are required to don.

In this perhaps there is something to commend it, for never has Kant's Categorical Imperative been given a more focused and energetic expression. Unfortunately however, multiculturalism proceeds from an incorrect picture of humanity, and in its excesses becomes repressive and demonic. Blood and history really do matter; or at the very least, they are not dispensable. The pulse-side of man wants to advance his own family and policies and visions. This, presumably, is why he goes to market in the first place.

The extreme alternative to this ultra-utilitarian civil ethics is to turn business itself into a political weapon, such that the buying and selling of wares is restricted between preferred parties. This is the principle that governs international trade, and also the labyrinthine intrigues of every dusty Silk Road bazaar. Libertarianism can only flourish within a political horizon; it cannot condition interactions between competing horizons. This is why the dreams of globalization, the attempt to transform the entire earth into a single free market, will never be realized. Political considerations will always intrude, then become paramount. We can only expect that as our political life becomes more fragmented, our economics will become more "Asiatic." Ironically, the anarchy of libertarianism is nothing but the ornament of an overrefined civilization, as OEH has pointed out.

The great trick is to preserve the free market as engine of opportunity, but to so distribute property such that the interests of every agent lie comfortably close to home. This can only be achieved by elevating moral principles above the unrestricted operations of the market; hence capitalist ideology has a fatal flaw too often overlooked by conservatives. The optimality we seek is attained not through unbridled competition, but through the security gained by having each agent permanently related to some productive private property. The "ownership society," properly understood, is an essentially distributist ideal which has been rendered complete by admitting the distinctions of blood and history which libertarian capitalism ignores.

Herbert's Future

2009-03-17T15:16:00.005-06:00

(Note: Here's a brief exposition of points that I will assuredly touch upon again and again as the blog develops. It concerns the interplay of technology and the future of the West, which I foresee progressing along a decidedly Herbertian trajectory.)

Comment on Belmont Club "Save the Newspapers"

I think the argument that the internet, by virtue of its ability to collate and disseminate content virtually without limit or price-point constraint, will become the new matrix of news-gathering and -sharing in the new world order, is subject to some fatal criticisms, among which are these:

1) There is the argument that newspapers, requiring costly brick-and-morter concomitants like printing presses, paper pulp, and labor and technical staff, are too capital intensive to hold their own against the free-wheeling internet. This argument utterly ignores how capital intensive the internet itself is. All those PCs, monitors, cell phones, data satellites, broadband networks, server banks, programmers, and IT people don’t come cheap. In fact, the internet is a flagrant exigency to a much greater extent than the humble print media were, and as a result of its complexity is subject to greater systemic risk. The vast technological accomplishment stands atop a teetering tower of social, economic, and political stability which is by no means guaranteed.

2) What, then, will become of the internet if its supporting physical infrastructure cannot be maintained? What is the use of a computer without a constant reliable supply of electrical power? Perhaps someday soon, due to the economic downturn and other related problems in the Western world, a growing number of people will decide to ditch their expensive phone/cable/internet packages. They’ll be working harder anyway, trying to salvage a meaningful standard of living, and will have little time for websurfing. Sales of PC hardware and software slump, disincentivising continued investment in the IT sector. Corporations as well as individuals begin to scale down their web presence. Various server banks are taken offline, and link rot becomes a pervasive problem. These factors combine to create an environment of positive feedback which accelerates the abandonment of the net. For many intents and purposes, large sections of what was previously cyberspace becomes a cyber ghost town.

3) Society adjusts to the dwindling supply of internet capacity by demanding subsidization. Basic internet availability begins to be looked upon as a public utility, the usage of which is both obligatory and metered. E-mail, shopping, identification, and registration for government services are the only online tools available to most people, while the wealthy and the government have access to a “higher order internet." This spawns a craft-guild a highly skilled specialists devoted to producing a suite of ever more inventive web-based applications for the well-to-do, while widening the digital and cultural divide.

4) Finally, the majority of people come to regard the internet with the same mixture of disdain and paranoia usually reserved for the East German Secret Police, and it ends up collapsing in the wake of a popular uprising like a virtual Berlin Wall. The entire course of events takes only 30 to 40 years to play out, after which the future becomes very different than what we often imagine it to be like.

It’s not that the print media reestablish themselves; it’s that society begins to focus on the development of those personal, uniquely human talents and attributes that far excede the scope and performance of mere machines. The West flowers with “mentats” and “bene gesserites” who knit the great forces unleashed by modernity into the warp and weft of their own personalities. The future of the West, far from being a Kurzweilian techno-utopia, becomes a Herbertian neo-feudal Holy Roman Empire.

This, at any rate, is my best-guess blueprint for the next half century. I find the broad outlines compellingly likely. Thoughts, anyone?

UPDATE: Let us also remember in this connection that journalism itself, far from being a natural feature of the human race at all times and places, is really a quasi-political activity appropriate only to the world-cities of late-stage civilizations in the Spenglerian framework. (An upcoming post on Oswald Spengler's influence upon my own philosophical outlook is in the works.)

Beginnings and Endings

2009-03-12T10:08:00.002-06:00

Comment on Belmont Club "Beginnings and Endings"

Wretchard wrote:

Maybe at the end of the rainbow, the one [Barack Obama]’s been chasing all his life, was the thing that had been pursuing him.

This has been exactly my assessment of Barack Obama’s character for some time now. It amazes me that it is not more widely apparent. He has always been an angry, bitter man; a man with a grudge to nurse and an unbounded appetite for destruction. He jumps Jim Crow in front of the successful white liberal Kennedy set. Knowing that he cannot ascend to their ranks through his own qualities, he has become their courtesan, fluffing their egos and indulging their prejudices, all the while resenting them and seeking to cut off the sources of their attention-grabbing power. Likewise, he garners the sympathy of the many ignorant and gullible voters of the land who harbor secret sentiments not greatly differing from his own: resentment towards all that is good and beautiful, all that is high and hale, all that is noble and free. His presidency is destined for tragedy. He has attained the highest office in the land and already he realizes that it will do nothing to satisfy his empty self. Already he grows tired of the burden: nihilistic, aloof, and fell.

I pray for him. I offer up my own anxieties as a penance for his soul, and I ask that some of his burden be shifted unto me before he really loses it. For there are millions of people in this country and around the world who do not know their right hand from their left; people whom Barack Obama and his policies will lead to ruin if he is not prevented from carving the signs of his torment across the face of the country.

Aphorism

2009-03-11T09:53:00.000-06:00

Ambiguity, the enemy of life, has too often been seen as the friend of philosophy.

-Matt Beck

Evangelical Collapse?

2009-03-10T20:42:00.000-06:00

Michael Spencer at The Christian Science Monitor lays out the reasons for The Coming Evangelical Collapse. Brief and worth a look. My thanks to Duane J. Oldsen for drawing this to my attention.

As a former Pentecostal turned Roman Catholic, this issue resonates with me from both sides. Spencer is probably right in forecasting difficult times ahead for evangelicalism, but the reasons he gives for this seem a little scrambled. It is not the attachment to conservative social goals which threaten the movement, for conservatism is quite healthy and will only increase as the material situation worsens in the years to come. Far more fatal to evengelicalism is its weddedness to the Prosperity Gospel, which will seem increasingly shallow (not to mention unattainable for most) in the face of widespread social unrest.

Spencer is certainly right, though, in condemning the lack of doctrinal rigor and basic Christian formation among the generic Protestant denominations. He sees this as a boon for orthodoxy, and again he is right. There is no doubt in my mind that hordes of the newly downtrodden, looking for an authentic Christian experience, will soon make the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, and Episcopalian churches rather popular places to be; but once more, his reasoning seems a little screwy. He first bemoans that people are abandoning evangelicalism because it's too socially conservative, and then he announces that this will benefit the catholic churches....who are supposed to be less conservative?! I can only conclude that this man doesn't understand what orthodoxy really means, nor the social forces driving people to embrace it.

The "pragmatic, therapeutic" megachurches will be the first victims of the turning tide, not the exceptions to it. The newly faithful congregants at the orthodox churches--hardboiled and distinctly intolerant of BS--will demand that the priests look and act like priests, that the sacraments be respected, and that the Gospel be proclaimed without embarrassment. The future will belong to orthodoxy as the prevailing cultural attitude becomes more conservative, not less.

Spencer again reaches the correct conclusion in describing what will be left. Pentecostalism is perhaps the only serious alternative to the sacramental/liturgical system of apostolic Christianity, as it retains Trinitarian baptism and a pronounced emphasis on the Cross; however, its premillenial dispensationalism is a stumbling block to determined Scriptural scholarship.

Of course, I am biased in favor of a Roman Catholic future. But I think that, in the last analysis, this is more than just a bias: it is a prophetic hope.

A Leibnizian Rebuttal to Kurzweil's Singularity.

2009-03-10T09:40:00.000-06:00

(Note: This post was written by me approximately a year and a half ago in order to refute certain computational theories of mind that had arisen in another discussion forum. Also refuted here is the related notion that the universe tends inevitably towards an "Omega Point," Teilhard de Chardin's vision of a pole of maximum integration and connotation which draws all things unto itself. Ray Kurzweil, the director of MIT's Media Lab, has argued for decades that this Omega Point {or "Singularity," as he prefers to call it} will be brought about by an ever-accelerating advance of computational power and neural nanotechnology. Obviously, this mistaken understanding is predicated on several false metaphysical presuppositions: 1) That the universe in its basic essence is composed of wholly knowable and predictable digital components. 2) That the mind of man is an epiphenomenon arising from physical interactions among these components. 3) That this mind is a physical structure mirroring the funtion of a von Neumann stored-program computer, and amenable to physical manipulation on that account. I have argued here that not only are these metaphysical notions erroneous, but the Omega Point itself is a corruption of the Christian idea of the Eschaton, which cannot occur within history but only beyond it. Hence, all Omega Point theologies are in fact millenarian heresies with an element of the anti-Christ about them. The Church, while ever striving to perfect all aspects of earthly life as much as possible, must be on her guard against such thinking.)

Since addressing the “theories of consciousness” problem adequately would require stipulating to certain ontological facts that have not really been mentioned here, I think I should begin with a theological examination of the concept of the singularity, from first principles.

Is there an End of History? Are we to seek for a temporal manifestation of the ideal of unbounded liberty? Do such transhumanistic notions spring from a genuine mystical imperative, and are they capable of becoming the object of Man’s ultimate concern? Are these the “Kingdom Come” that our Lord instructs us to pray for? Or are they something else perhaps – something less desirable?

It may not have escaped notice that all proposed actualizations of the omega point involve constructions which are essentially mechanical in nature, whether they be computers made from folded space or artificial neurons made from nanomachines. Nor has it gone unmentioned that this transformation of Man’s physical and mental environment into an all-inclusive, controllable machine has been a distinguishing feature of Western millenarianism whenever the latter has broken out. It is quite possible to doubt the plausibility of such constructions, but that would leave the underlying philosophical problem untouched: With what reason do we regard such a world as being superior to the one we actually inhabit? Or in other words: Why is this necessarily the pole toward which “progress” progresses?

The question goes to the heart of the subjective nature of progress. Among the singularity champions, of course, it is never even asked. The assumption that all progress moves inevitably toward the singularity is the implicit justification of their entire program. By examining carefully the nature of this assumption, we obtain a key as to the theological significance of the singularity. Let us begin by dissecting its aforementioned mechanical nature.

Mechanics, be it noted, is thoroughly positivistic. A technical artifact receives its meaning, and therefore its form, entirely from the purposes it was constructed to fulfill. Its existence is intentional, and as a result its relevant attributes are strictly limited and capable of exhaustive quantitative description. This very purposefulness is the hallmark of all artifacts; there can be accidental discoveries, but there are no accidental technologies.

This immediately sets the artifact apart from the matter from which it is constructed, as the latter always possesses additional attributes that are incidental to the intended purpose of the artifact. These attributes it must possess, if for no other reason than that it was capable (through some sort of physical manipulation) of being transformed into the artifact in question. Any “perfect technology,” as it were, would utilize the full spectrum of attributes of its constituent material, and by definition could not be further transformed into anything else. Nor could it have been transformed from anything else, as this would assume the existence of some mode of action by which the constituent material could be affected, but in which it had no inherent ability to participate – a contradiction. A machine is an orchestration of incidents; mechanical properties of its constituent materials are defined, abstracted out from their carriers, quantified, and recombined in exact ratios in order to produce the intended result. We have shown that a perfect machine must possess at least all the qualities of its material, but also that it cannot possess more than these. In other words, it would be identical in all respects to the material from which it was made. It would seem then, that the only “perfect technology” is reality itself, the unmolested matter, plain and simple.

Important implications follow. If reality is more perfect than any possible machine, then naturally it could not be simulated by any machine – so much for the idea of a computer reconstructing the universe at the end of time. Furthermore, since we now see that any machine must be less than the sum total of its own materials, no computer could even simulate itself, let alone the universe. But it is possible to make an even bolder claim. If reality is more perfect than any possible machine, then it can never be perfectly decomposed into mechanical units by mechanical processes. There can be no completely quantifiable, fundamental building blocks of reality, and consequently no “Theory of Everything” to account for them. No machine, no matter how large, could adequately simulate any bit of reality, no matter how small. Ultimately, the universe is not amenable to technological description. We cannot use physical processes to explain themselves.

Additionally, to make the same point with another argument, we recall from an earlier definition that all technologies are intentional. For the entire universe to assume the properties of a technology then, we would have to enlarge our circle of intentionality to the point that it covered the whole of physical reality. But we have already seen that reality can not be quantified. The furthest advance we can make in this direction is to apply the concept of intentionality ex post facto to the events as they occur. With this, the intellect has dissolved itself and violated its own necessity. Just as a perfect machine would be identical to reality, a perfect intention would be identical to actuality. The theoretical limit of pure, mechanical ideation could only will that the world be exactly as it is anyway. To attempt further alteration would assume the existence of knowledge concerning reality that could not be derived from reality – a contradiction. And since we can only intend that which we have defined, and reality can not be totally defined (see above), it stands to reason that reality is more perfect than any intention.

This being the case, no Theory of Everything can be forthcoming. Furthermore, since no mechanical intention can include all the attributes of a given material, no act of mechanical ideation can even perfectly encapsulate the properties of the very machine it was intended to produce. The bolder claim again follows naturally. Since reality is more perfect than any intention, it could never be decomposed by quantitative means into exactly definable thought-units (for if it could, these thought-units could be reassembled into reality by some larger theory, violating the perfection of reality). No theory, no matter how grand, could adequately explain any bit of reality, no matter how tiny. The universe is ultimately not amenable to technical description.

Neither the physical world nor the spirit who perceives it is explicable in terms of itself or of the other. They must radiate from a source that transcends them both and this source we call God.

We are now ready to get to the crux of the problem, and examine what is implied by this particular notion of progress. Man’s will to technical self-extension is natural and healthy, but it is not perfect. Every act of mechanical ideation must by definition involve a denial of the unrealized attributes. As a result of this, machines not only fail to emulate reality, they also break down and decay. This is the basis of that which, in physics, is known as entropy. Theologically speaking, entropy is the “judgment” of God that brings justice to the unrealized attributes and denies the property of ultimacy to man’s creations. In the will to technical self-extension, Man takes the judgment upon himself sacrificially, and receives in return his “dominion” over the Earth.

But this communion breaks down when the will to self-extension becomes the will to technological transcendence. Ontically, matter exists in a state of created perfection. The will to mechanicalize the entire world must involve the act of denying this created perfection in totality. What once was sacrifice has become hubris. By denying the perfection of created being, we exalt the principle of non-being to supremacy in our minds. The will to technical transcendence is Satanic; the singularity is the Antichrist. It is the form in which the idea of “mammon” receives a logical maximum of connotative weight. It is that which is continuously overcome within the stream of history by the very nature of being itself; by its infinite superiority over non-being, by the eternal operations of divine Providence.

Thus, there is no End of History.

The bearing this all has upon theories of consciousness may not be obvious, but it is nonetheless logically direct. If we take all the proceeding to be true, then it is plain that human consciousness can neither reach matter nor result from matter – and most assuredly can not be replaced by matter. In fact even “matter”, as we commonly use the term, can not be reduced to purely material units.

The Western intellect has come full-circle. The journey out of secular night and into the light of revelation is underway. Due to the very ferocity of our particular style of technical ideation and the self-negating tendencies inherent in it, we have prepared our collective consciousness for that day when the reality of God will once again become a persistent, pervasive, and vivid experience.

Portentous Times

2009-03-09T23:50:00.000-06:00

(Note: This post was written to address a discussion concerning Strauss and Howe's cyclical theory of Anglo-American history, which has arisen on John Reilly's bulletin board. Click here to see it in context.)

HopefulCynic68 wrote:

IMHO the thing about 911 is that it didn't come at the right time. I disagree
with S&H about the time scale, IMHO it would be more accurate to say that
the 1T in American ran from about 1945 to 1965. The 2T ran from then to the
middle-80s.

My thinking is coming into alignment with yours on this matter. 9/11 was, in retrospect, smack-dab in the thick of a third-turning weltanshauung. Only now are the cracks in that world picture beginning to widen and ramify; and the most insidious dangers are coming from inside America, not outside it.

The first month-and-a-half of Barack Obama's presidency has been a momentous disaster outstripping even my own pessimism, which was often condemned as excessive before the election. The economy is in tatters, millions of jobs have been lost, and everywhere the freedom and moral standards instituted by America's founders are under assault. The will of the Obama team is now made manifest: his intention is to destroy as much goodness and beauty as he can lay his hands upon. This is no exaggeration, for the facts speak for themselves. All we have to do is list his policies and decisions so far in order to judge the motive behind them.

1. Barack Obama wants to destroy as many innocent human beings as possible. Firstly, he wants to maximize the number of abortions performed around the world by releasing federal funds for abortion mills abroad, and also by his surreptitious support of elements of the FOCA legislation here at home. Secondly, he has recently decided to fund the mining of human embryos for scientific research. Thirdly, his proposed massive overhall of the healthcare system will result in the application of financially motivated triage to people suffering from grave medical conditions. Not only that, but it will also strangle the federal budget, will federalize medical records under a central Washington authority, and will pave the way for systematic violations of human privacy and dignity too malignant to predict ahead of time. In effect, the practice of medice in this country will be subverted.

2. Barack Obama wants to destroy the American economy. The trillions of dollars of stimulus money either disbursed or promised to date have been met with unanimous skepticism on the part of the financial powers, who are resenting the intrusion of government into their businesses. The money comes with too many strings attached, imparting a burden which capitalism cannot bear. Meanwhile, from Citigroup to GM, the shares of corporation after corporation continue to waft moribund about the floors of the great trading houses like the detritus of cleared receipts, like the confetti from some forgotten party at West Egg. But what's worse, the inflationary holocaust and confiscatory tax hike released by such irresponsible disbursement will bankrupt my generation and that of my children before they're born, while the moral hazard created by the bailout of failed institutions and homeowners will make a mockery out of honest business practices which the free market will never recover from. After the crash, a third world system of bureaucratic bribes and patronage will be all that remains of America's post-war industrial keiretsu.

3. Barack Obama has already destroyed American standing in the world to a much greater degree than George W. Bush ever did. His proposal to essentially buy off the Taliban in Afghanistan will not work. Hillary Clinton's ridiculous "overcharge button" mistake has made our State Department look incompetent, while Obama's gift of videos to Gordon Brown is a shameful way to treat a foreign premier and ally. This is all quite juvenile: clearly the behavior of men and women who have spent too much time in a college dorm room setting. Remember Obama's "breakout groups" session with the Congress? Remember how somber he sounded when he laid out the itinerary? I'm sure even ardent supporters had to stifle a cringe at the sight of the boy-man Obama trying to look presidential while rattling off how the breakout groups were going to work like some marxo-feminist hippie commune house mother. This is not a safe occasion for schadebfreude however, as America's enemies are watching too. Does anyone think that Kim Jong Il or Vladimir Putin are the slightest bit afraid of Hillary Clinton?

4. Barack Obama has poisoned the gaiety and joie de vivre of American life through his constant ominous sermonizing and his radical expansion of federal powers. No one in America, except for a few academics and political mandarins like Hillary and Obama, really want a Washington Czar intruding into private decisions and business practices. Horrible ideas like Cap-and-Trade and Card Check are fundamentally inimical to the spirit of this country. The backlash, even among Obama's boosters in the press, is already quite strong.

All this bespeaks of growing, systematic tensions within the current situation that demand an existential solution. While conditions will not yet allow the outrage to break through, I cannot escape the conclusion that America is marching inevitably toward a condition of civil war. And not only in America, for all around the globe there are hotspots (Iran, North Korea, Pakistan) which are on the brink of collapse. Foreign powers will be drawn into any intra-American conflict in umpredictable ways. A generation of carnage will prevail, at the end of which a 'Congress of Vienna' solution will be enacted by the surviving remnants of the world's great powers. The pieces are moving into place for a sundering fourth-turning event.

The American Federation, that noble experiment, will not survive the next global conflict. It's great economy, the engine of the world's wealth, will have been dealt serious wounds. America will go on of course, but not as a single constitutional republic. We are building towards a situation in which all will be consumated. The fates of Israel, the Middle East, Europe, the Caucasus, and northeast Asia are very uncertain. Although this will not be the parousia, the literal end of the world, it will sure feel like it at times.

I must remark on this occasion how much I miss W. Even his infamous "mushroom cloud" speech now seems like a prophetic reality. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the lower New York harbor go up in plasma at some point during the next ten years; in fact I have an eerie premonition that it will happen. There are many dangerous forces in the world who would like nothing more than to permanently damage the power of the United States.

We are living in portentous times. There has never been a fourth turning wherein the potential for global nuclear conflict was a likely possibility. The next 30-40 years will determine the future history of the world for centuries. It's time to decide what you believe.

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

2009-03-07T09:22:00.000-07:00

Starring Ben Stein
Reviewed by Matt Beck

The world is changing.

No, that isn’t merely this reviewer’s melodramatic reference to The Lord of the Rings. There is in fact a change of epic proportions just beginning in the deep metaphysical currents of Western societies; a change whose full dimensions are so far apparent only to the very few, but one whose direction and causes will be no mystery to any who have sought the truth with sincerity and determination. Many intelligent people, from various walks of life, are coming around to the belief that there is something profoundly wrong with how the scientific dialog is progressing. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—yes, you know them: that menacing quartet consisting of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—have been criticized by those both inside and outside the scientific establishment for their condescending tone and lack of philosophical rigor. It isn’t just that cracks in the Darwinian orthodoxy are being inexpertly papered over (and those cracks were always visible in any case), but that science itself no longer stands apart from the murky metaphysical debates in its pursuit of empirical truth. It is increasingly obvious—brutally obvious might be more accurate—that open inquiry, logic and criticism, reason and evidence have fallen out of fashion, to be replaced by a spirit of tribal warfare. Scientific shibboleths like Darwinian evolution now stand as proxies for a worldview that tolerates no dissent.

This is an encouraging sign, believe it or not. Any strong civilizational belief in a so-called objective science only builds up an impenetrable armor-plating against justified criticism which leads to tyranny. We are better off to be free of this baggage from the 19th Century. The debate has always been about worldviews, as the Christian opponents of Darwinism knew better than anyone. With the specter of an immaculate science now relativized down to the same human level as the rest of us, conditions are finally right for the debate to begin in earnest. However, the oversolicitous champions of scientism are not going to give up their privileged position without a fight.

In this 90 minute documentary, former presidential speech writer, commentator, actor, and humorist Ben Stein attempts to take the fight to them. One’s estimation of his success will no doubt be largely colored by one’s own opinions of the subject matter, but the film is well worth seeing despite its mixed results. It styles itself as a broadside for academic freedom (there’s even an online petition you can sign if you’d like to support the effort), yet it is primarily a not-so-subtle argument for the theory of Intelligent Design. Suitably, it begins with a series of interviews of prominent biologists who have seen their careers damaged or ended for daring to mention Intelligent Design in their classrooms or published papers. This is indeed most unfortunate, not to mention impossible to square with any reasonable interpretation of academic freedom. Think what you will about ID, the rights of free peoples to research and discuss it should be inviolate. Almost everyone can agree on that. What the scientific establishment does not agree on, however, are the rights of such people to public monies and to tenure at publicly funded institutions. The movie only hints at the bread-and-butter aspect of this academic debate, but it is safe to say that, for most working scientists, personal job security far outweighs ideology when it comes to determining why they believe and publish as they do.

Most working scientists; certainly not all, and certainly not the leading lights of the ultra-Darwinian cheering chorus featured in the next segment of the film. For them, ideology is front and center. The publicly expressed sentiments of men like Richard Dawkins leave no doubt that their attitudes are informed by extreme antireligious and anti-Christian leanings. Such attitudes are often disturbing to hear spelled out in full clarity. Calm, highly credentialed scientists at the pinnacle of their profession, warmly discussing the elimination of religious belief from the world as if it were some kind of disease, are fearful things to behold. Their impenetrable egos, distorted logic, willful misreading of history and readiness to desacralize human life all bear an unmistakable Luciferian stamp. One of their number—the creepy Dr. Will Provine of Cornell University—even exhibits signs of demonic possession. If you don’t believe me, watch the film; he speaks about his own imminent suicide and his rejection of free will in tones that are positively hellish.

And in case anybody is still wondering, yes, the connections to Nazism and the eugenics movement are made. In the fourth segment of the film, Stein visits a former Nazi extermination camp for medical defectives. Amid stock footage of emaciated corpses, he asks his German guide if she thought the perpetrators were insane. “No,” she answered in broken English. “They weren’t insane because they had purposes.” Her simple answer was exactly to the point. The Nazi doctors of death wouldn’t have met any clinical definition of insanity. They were acting out the implications of their worldview with perfect logical consistency. A committed Darwinist can carry out crimes against humanity with an eerie impassivity, convinced of the rational underpinnings of his actions. After the war, a much-maligned Martin Heidegger tried to make this point to a world that had already decided not to forgive him. Ben Stein makes it for us again today. He sees the same evil implicit in our contemporary abortion practices, and it’s hard to argue with his conclusions.

But the film is probably most effective in its third segment, which highlights the thinking of various intellectuals for whom Darwinism does not compute. The crowning moment is Stein’s conversation with the well-traveled, highly accomplished David Berlinski. It serves no purpose to ask whether or not Darwinism is correct when the theory is not precise enough to be correct or incorrect. The fuzziness of Darwinian Theory has been noted by many before. In Berlinski’s words, it is like “looking into a room full of smoke.” I think the film will have served its purpose if it prompts viewers to seriously reflect upon one single question: What do we mean when we say “evolution”? If we mean a vague notion that life changes over time, virtually nobody would dispute it. But that is not the theory that Darwin advanced. Textbook evolutionary theory is committed to upholding the common decent of all life on earth from a single ancestor, origins unspecified, via speciation through random mutation and natural selection. It leaves no room for teleology of any kind, from any source, in any degree, at any stage. This stronger claim is impossible to defend with empirical evidence, and masks a deeper agenda which is fearful of being exposed. One of the scientists featured here admonishes us to “beware the sound of one hand clapping.” Whenever one side asserts that the debate is finished, that’s because it isn’t.

For my own part, I am no follower of Darwin, but I have little use for Intelligent Design, either. If living organisms have been designed, that means that there is some algorithm capable of exhaustively describing their capacities. Even if said algorithm is exceedingly complex, such that it could never be deciphered within a comprehensible timescale or written down within the observable universe, it remains nonetheless finite and unmysterious. Under this scheme, freedom is just as much an illusion as it is under Darwin’s. But if those dissenters had read Aristotle, or Aquinas, or Leibniz, or Goethe, they would have known there is another way; a knowledge as old as time, expressed in many settings and uttered in various idioms, but everywhere an expression of the same pure intuition, that life is the prime stuff of existence. It doesn’t arise from anything simpler, either by design or by chance. A living being is a monad, an atom of nature, a form inhering in matter, which, although limited, stands atop an infinite depth. We have a Creator to be sure, but his unsearchable Word cannot be reduced to a set of biomolecular Tinkertoys. Intelligent Design is perhaps a shallower version of Darwinism, an occultic explanation of life prepared from the same Cartesian fallacies as its antagonist. What’s missing from biology is an understanding of Being as it actually is. But now the world is waking up. Perhaps we will soon be ready for Intelligent Dasein.

So Stands the Tree

2009-03-06T13:20:00.000-07:00

Hard up through the Cloven Stone a lonely Tree did spring
His Tempest-twisted Branches groan, his Roots to rubble cling
No Will of Wood did his surpass, no strength of Bough could best
The might with which he’d heaved in Half his first and Fateful Test
The sundered Stone through which he’d grown had seared a vicious twist
His Limbs were wrought by walls of Stone that Sunlight never kissed
The broken Boulder warped his pose, his Crown not Fair and Free
Like Leaflets through the Olden snows o’ Ground, so grew the Tree

But this was not to be an End, though Fate had bent his Bole
The ‘Love of Fate’ that Nietzsche preached was this Tree’s very Soul
Though cold of Heart, he made his start, and caught what Light he could
He reveled in the ‘would’ of Will, and showed the Will of Wood
As day by day the Rock did give, the Wrath of Fate he broke
The Destiny that Green things live no Scandalon can choke
For freer now he spread his Shade, and fairer grew his Glee
Twisted still, but tough and staid, so better grew the Tree

But bitter Winds now shook his Limbs, and blew him evil thoughts
“The other Trees have lives of ease, and you have gnarled Knots”
“You struggle for each breath of Air. Your friends are High and Hale”
“So why consent to be this bent? Wither, thee, and Fail!”
“Never”, spoke the tree at last. “I’ll not give up my Crown”
“The Will of Wood to Hope shall fast. I’ll have this Mountain down!”
The bitter Wind grew foul and grinned, and whispered hauntingly
“Twas said of Old that ‘As the Twig is bent, so grows the Tree’”

They struggle to this very day, though now the Tide is turned
When Skyward Hope bends Bough to grope, the Winds of Wrath are spurned
The Testing Stone beneath his Roots is now a wholesome Loam
Abundantly he bears his Fruits—this Tree has found his Home
He’s shed the Bark that once was dark, his face is now his own
His past with haste hath Time erased, his torture far outgrown
High and Hale his Limbs now Soar, His Crown is Fair and Free
A hymn to Hope forevermore—and sound—so stands the Tree