We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
David J. Theroux, founder and president of The Independent Institute and the C.S. Lewis Society of California, discusses the writings of C.S. Lewis and Lewis's views on liberty, natural law and statism.
Now that we have considered difficulties in the idea of progress, it is time to enter the politics of progress. Progress reduces the scope of politics and thus minimizes the relevance of the common good. The common good tends to become the sum of individual benefits, in which the “common good” is that of individuals similarly benefited, and not sharing and cooperating in a common life. Government promises security—in comfort, of course, not bare survival—for individuals as such; it places this goal above promoting a certain democratic way of life. Americans learn to put their security, meaning each one’s own security, first—ahead of public-spirited thoughts and actions for the whole. Consider Social Security, America’s largest entitlement, which actually individualizes society, rendering security less “social,” by giving each retired worker independent means. Social Security is quite different from the idea of “national security,” which brings Americans together in a whole. The democracy of progressives leads toward the society that Tocqueville described as the soft despotism of “individualism,” in which individuals, out of a sense of their own impotence in the face of vast social change, excuse themselves from pleasures and sacrifices prompted by public-spiritedness.
Employers keep ratcheting up their educational credential demands to sift out people who, on the basis of their lower credential levels are presumably less competent and trainable. It’s not just the business sector that contributes to credential inflation — so does government.
Beechwood fires burn bright and clear If the logs are kept a year Store your beech for Christmastide With new holly laid beside Chestnuts only good they say If for years 'tis stayed away Birch and firwood burn too fast Blaze too bright and do not last Flames from larch will shoot up high Dangerously the sparks will fly But Ashwood green and Ashwood brown Are fit for a Queen with a golden crown
Oaken logs, if dry and old Keep away the winters cold Poplar gives a bitter smoke Fills your eyes and makes you choke Elmwood burns like churchyard mould Even the very flames burn cold Hawthorn bakes the sweetest bread So it is in Ireland said Applewood will scent the room Pears wood smells like a flower in bloom But Ashwood wet and Ashwood dry A King may warm his slippers by.
Memorize everything you can which you find worthy. Poetic verse, biblical verses, aphorisms, and song lyrics most lend themselves to it, but so does anything worthwhile.
None of these progressive sociologists would dream of suggesting that the rich are better—but all their solutions for the problems of the poor turn out to be attempts to make the poor act and think more like the rich, and never the other way around.
If the Western establishment were truly moral, it would reject multiculturalism as a deductive, anti-empirical, and illiberal creed. It would demand that critics abroad first put their own house in order before blaming others for their own failures, and remind Western elites that their multicultural fantasies are cheap nostrums designed to deal with their own neuroses.
Finally, it would also not welcome in newcomers who seek to destroy the very institutions that make the West so unlike the homelands they have voted with their feet to utterly abandon.
My impression is that higher ed is an industry today, government-subsidized. They will take almost anybody regardless of IQ, character, academic achievement or curiosity, etc. and run them through their credentialing machine for big bucks.
Sitting in Darkness, Blogging the Light - As the Christmas season draws to a close and the return of regular blogging looms, I’m looking back over this short period of intense religion writing and thinking about how writing on religion is and is not like writing on other controversial topics.
The real point of faith blogging... isn’t to shore up the moral underpinnings of the civil order. It’s to integrate your deepest convictions into the work you do as a writer and thinker. Faith shapes the way I think about the world and the future of our species; I wouldn’t be doing my job as a political and social analyst if I didn’t make that clear. It’s both important to your clarity of thought as well as a part of the transparency you owe to your readers to share or at least to explain the ideals and the beliefs that matter most and allow you to make sense of the world, and to let readers get a better look at the heart of your vision.
However, the reason that is, despite all of the studies showing that most kids benefit little or nothing from college, is because work aptitude tests are now mostly illegal: Thank SCOTUS for Credential Inflation
The best modern book on belief is “My Bright Abyss” by my Yale colleague, Christian Wiman. In it, he writes, “When I hear people say they have no religious impulse whatsoever ... I always want to respond: Really? You have never felt overwhelmed by, and in some way inadequate to, an experience in your life, have never felt something in yourself staking a claim beyond yourself, some wordless mystery straining through word to reach you? Never?”
Most believers seem to have had these magical moments of wonder and clearest consciousness, which suggested a dimension of existence beyond the everyday. Maybe it happened during childbirth, with music, in nature, in love or pain, or during a moment of overwhelming gratitude and exaltation.
These glimmering experiences are not in themselves faith, but they are the seed of faith.
This (Brooks') column resonated with me after this intense experience of writing my Dante book. As I wrote it, I was surprised to discover that the particularly religious aspect of my pilgrimage out of sickness and depression — that is, the role that prayer, confession, and liturgy played in the process — was more important than I had thought (and I knew it was pretty important). And it wasn’t just any religion: it was Orthodox Christianity, with its intense focus on the necessity to do hard inner spiritual work on repentance. And it wasn’t just any Orthodox parish: it was ours, pastored by Father Matthew, a tough-love priest who is compassionate, but who doesn’t let that compassion get in the way of compelling his parishioners to own up to and face down their sins.
He does this, I think, because he was once a police officer, and every day went out on the front lines of sin — that is, where sin leads. After seven years, he burned out. Couldn’t handle it — the violence, the injustice, the constant anger he had inside. He told me that he would stand at the liturgy and cry his eyes out during that time — and if you know Father Matthew, you know he’s a tough guy; the thought of him crying his eyes out is shocking. But that’s how broken he was...
In the back woods of the Northeast, most local people drive crappy little old RWD rusty GM sedans and zoom around nicely with snow tires while the skiers from the cities slip and slide their Subarus and 4-WD Suburbans, Range Rovers, and Escalades all over the roads and into the ditches.
America has more laws, rules, and regulations than anybody could learn in a lifetime - or could obey without a large team of lawyers on hand at all times. I'm in favor of a ten-year moratorium on new laws, giving time to roll back old laws.
The year was 1943, and another Advent had dawned for Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer loved Advent and had often preached sermons on this holy season of waiting and hope as a metaphor for the entire Christian life. Just one year earlier, during the Advent of 1942, Bonhoeffer had written a circular letter to some of his friends and former students:
"The joy of God goes through the poverty of the manger and the agony of the cross; that is why it is invincible, irrefutable. It does not deny the anguish, when it is there, but finds God in the midst of it, in fact precisely there; it does not deny grave sin but finds forgiveness precisely in this way; it looks death straight in the eye, but it finds life precisely within it."
Those words took on a deeper meaning in December 1943 as Bonhoeffer found himself one of eight hundred prisoners awaiting trial in Berlin’s Tegel military prison.
Central planning by our moral and intellectual superiors. Would anybody in a free country want that, even if we had any moral and intellectual superiors?
Gruber’s widely publicized revelations about the political strategy of pushing through landmark legislation that voters would reject if they “understood” what was in it is typical of the scientific planner mindset. Scientific planners like Gruber believe that they know better what ordinary people need than the people themselves, that people are too stupid to make decisions for themselves, and that more intelligent technocrats must intervene in their lives on their behalf.
ObamaCare will puncture Gruber’s balloon, later if not sooner. The lesson that Gruber will learn is that ordinary people are actually smarter than the scientific planners...
Critics have tagged the Common Core with the pejorative "ObamaCore." The gibe is more instructive than many realize. The Affordable Care Act and the Common Core both involve ambitious efforts to change whole swaths of American life, though the practical impact of each was intentionally shrouded in uncertainty. Both would have benefited from more scrutiny early on but are now increasingly entrenched. In health care, critics have found it a losing strategy to talk about simply repealing the ACA without talking about what should replace it. They need to offer plausible alternatives to have a shot at policy or political success. Meanwhile, the ACA has started to change American medicine. The same is true of the Common Core. Five years on, it has started to change instruction, textbooks, and curriculum.
Despite the formality of the title, it's a very readable and persuasive book about our experiences of reality and the role of our local cultures in shaping our experience of reality.
Berger was on my mind because Pastor Keller had mentioned the idea of "relativizing the relativizers." I like that idea, because nobody can really think outside their own culture, and relativists and multiculturalists of all sorts tend not to be aware of how deeply Western and, indeed, parochial their views really are.
Americans should be pleased to know that the incidence of sexual assault (except in prisons) has been steadily in decline for many years. There is no epidemic and there is no rape culture in the US - indeed there is a strong Judeo-Christian anti-rape culture - but there are some individual sexual predators and rapists around, and there always will be. Here's a real rape culture:
Consider a genuine phenomenon of “rape culture:” the widespread practice of Pakistani pimps “grooming” underage English girls to be raped en masse by themselves and their clients.
Also interesting is that the incidence of violent sexual assault on campuses appears to be about half of that which occurs out in the real world. That is remarkable in some ways, considering that the campus today jams frequently-alcohol- or drug-intoxicated adolescent boys and girls too-close together in a generally sexually-disinhibited and hypersexualized atmosphere.
My view has always been this: if assaulted, sexually or otherwise, call the cops. It's a civic duty really, because odds are that the perp will strike again with someone else.
Best, most reasonable and comprehensive piece I've seen on the topic: The College Rape Overcorrection - Sexual assault on campus is a serious problem. But efforts to protect women from a putative epidemic of violence have led to misguided policies that infringe on the civil rights of men.
I am not sure why campus sexual assault is so often the focus of the media when sexual assault and violence of all sorts is far more frequent off campuses.
The (no math)
The often-lame David Brooks has an interesting piece in the NYT: