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.
The Jonathan Fairbanks house in Dedham, MA. 1636. Those are the bones of the basic center-hall Colonial. The slope of that roof is great for either snow or rain.
Multiculturally-sensitive though he may be, Sippican Cottage is omitting pueblos and phony old houses in St. Augustine from his thorough research on the topic. He means real wood-framed houses.
It's easy to detect the core of the farmhouse, before all of the additions and extensions.
Monotonic music mainly, with lyre, drum, trumpet and flute, with different "modes" to evoke different states of mind. The ancient Greeks considered their music and lyrics to be central to who they were as a civilization, and, of course, to be a gift from the gods. As best I can tell, poetry (the lyrics) was never offered without accompanying music.
The group Melpomen recreates the ancient sounds from surviving fragments. (Samples of the music at the Amazon site.)
Wiki has a fine summary of ancient Greek music. Interesting to read that Plato (c 400 BC) complained about the modern music which defied old forms.
"Ancient," to me, means before 1000 BC. After that, it's historic, more or less.
These are old pots. I stumbled on the Metropolitan Museum of Art's site with their collection of Athenian 6-4th Century BC red and black containers while searching for an illo for last Saturday's Saturday Verse. I am sure you have looked at their like before. These decorated containers were surely not for everyday use.
There are things we can touch and perceive, or perceive with technology. Some things cannot be touched but can be easily perceived, such as the charming young lassies above. Or mental life: ideas, emotions, etc. And spiritual life.
For some reason, it's Greek Week at Maggie's and, while looking for something else, I found this bit somewhere at Wiki:
Socrates is contemptuous of people who think that something has to be graspable in the hands to be real. In the Theaetetus, he says such people are "eu a-mousoi", an expression that means literally, "happily without the muses" (Theaetetus 156a). In other words, such people live without the divine inspiration that gives him, and people like him, access to higher insights about reality.
Socrates's idea that reality is unavailable to those who use their senses is what puts him at odds with the common man, and with common sense. Socrates says that he who sees with his eyes is blind, and this idea is most famously captured in his allegory of the cave, and more explicitly in his description of the divided line. The allegory of the cave (begins Republic 7.514a) is a paradoxical analogy wherein Socrates argues that the invisible world is the most intelligible ("noeton") and that the visible world ("(h)oraton") is the least knowable, and the most obscure.
It is certain that many are indifferent to the invisible world - practical, earth-bound types who are happily without the muses' gift - or burden - of reflecting on the "higher realities" and the hidden realities which seem to try to connect the human heart with the cosmic. The meta-physical or trancendent realm of thought and experience which many of us seek to grasp and hold. More:
The word metaphysics derives from the fact that Aristotle's musings about divine reality came after ("meta") his lecture notes on his treatise on nature ("physics"). The term is in fact applied to Aristotle's own teacher, and Plato's "metaphysics" is understood as Socrates' division of reality into the warring and irreconcilable domains of the material and the spiritual. The theory has been of incalculable influence in the history of Western philosophy and religion.
Indeed we are all Greeks - especially those of us who are Christians (the Greek Paul thoroughly Greekified the Christ Cult, thus translating it into a world religion). "Psyche," the soul, was a combination of the psych-ological (mental) and the spiritual/divine aspects of reality as we experience it, until academics in modern times separated psychology out as a topic of study in the Aristotelian slicing-and-dicing way. Being sober sorts, they did not want to call Psychologists "soul students," nor did Psychiatrists want to call themselves "soul physicians." So they put it in Greek, same as most of the other -ologists and -iatrists.
Photo on top of a few untouchable Muses borrowed from Egotastic. Image below: Bust of Socrates, Louvre
Left and Right participants, from Trotsky to Hayek, in the 20th Century’s debates over the role of government have agreed that a major danger emerges from the coming to power of the “New Class” of intellectuals and public policy managers whose primacy over the hoi polloi (some even refer to the commoners as sardines) is ensured by self-profiting politicians, together extending government controls into more spheres of society.(A brief summary of New Class thought at Wikipedia.)
This New Class debate lay at the core of understanding the essential corruption of morality, of true popular governance, and of state powers that ensues from the rise of this privileged New Class.
My friend Lorie Byrd tries to explain to the in-denial and in-disparagement New Class the Tea Party protests across the country by about 600,000 ordinary citizens: “many average, everyday Americans were not thrilled with the ‘change’ they were getting from the new administration.”This is not an intellectual movement, couched in fancy words, but is the hoi polloi’s recognition of a basic intellectual truth, that the New Class is robbing their resources for their own expansion of power and profiteering.
The rude – indeed classless -- disdain and insult expressed by so much of the liberal commentariat toward the Tea Partiers exhibits their deeper fears of their spreading rejection as more and more Americans realize and react to their gross power grabs.Their fear, and arrogance,propels their haste to ram through major redefining programs before they are stopped by the 2010 elections reducing their Congressional majorities.
2010 can’t come soon enough.So, it is proposed that Tea Partiers crowd the townhall-type meetings held by their Congressmen and Senators to drive the point home before 2010.
The New Class may lack class, but they will recognize their overstepping will undermine their own survival.Behind their crude attitude toward Tea Partiers is their recognition their window of opportunity to further aggrandize themselves is short.
The legacy media is rapidly being replaced by alternatives which do not insult or ignore the legitimate grievances of the hoi polloi.The captains of industryin-bed-with taxpayer bailouts for their excess greed and irresponsibility are recognizing the self-destructive deal with the devil relegating them to managers of the corporate state.The unions, whose demise in private industry has been offset by controlling the government bureaucracies, are seeing their legislative goals to increase their sway sinking, while their bankruptcy of public services through excess benefits is arousing the poorly served public.The leaders of non-profits, who use their tax-exemptions to indulge in obtaining taxpayer grants that feed huge compensation packages, are startled that they are being viewed as abusing their privileges.
A 30-minute video by Capt. Irving Johnson as a young man in 1929, capturing, in vivid black and white, the reality of sailing around the world on the Peking - including a Cape storm. h/t to Powerline for finding this remarkable record.
In the old days, going to sea was like going to war. Men died. John doesn't like the Captain's narration, but I love it. Sounds like he's from VT or NH, that old-timey Robert Frost sound. (Nope, Hadley, MA. I know Hadley well.)
The Peking is currently berthed at South Street Seaport, NYC.
This is a real American story about a true American idol. It's also a story about home-town America, which is, sadly, a disappearing way of true community life.
I met with an 83 year-old fellow the other day for a consultation. He was recovering from a heart attack from which he almost died ("I thought it was just a bad stomach ache but my wife didn't like the way I was sweating.") and a stent.
His cardiologist felt he was depressed, as often happens after serious cardiac events, especially with men.
He told me a little story, but first, a bit about him: Irish, retired policeman, living with his frail wife (a retired book-keeper) in the Boston suburb where he was born - same neighborhood and across the street from the house he grew up in (remembers horse-drawn fire engines down the block); daily Mass; in the church choir ("We sang at the Vatican in 1972 and we are proud of that."); plays trombone ("poorly") in his firehouse marching band; five attentive, devoted kids and 14 grandkids within twenty miles; does every charity thing he can find including Meals on Wheels (even though "I think I am older than most of the people I deliver to"); belongs to his local Vets organization; a WW2 Vet - a gunner in a B-26 Martin Marauder with the 320th Bomber Group of the 12th (Army) Air Force, in Italy: "When flak hit the airplane, it sounded like somebody shaking a bucket of gravel."
Says "We weren't scared. We already knew we would die in this war to save Europe, and we were sort of OK with that, but we were damn well gonna get all of the bad guys we could, first. Heck, we were just kids, looking back now, and full of beans and bacon."
His story: "I was at a wake of a friend a few weeks, ago, drinking and partying of course, and up comes somebody I knew from second grade at St. Anthony's. He says "You need to join our lunch group. We meet once a month at .... restaurant in the back room." I felt flattered to be invited, so I went. My God, I met folks I hadn't seen in years, all from the same home neighborhood - the --th Ward. About 25 guys, retired doctors, teachers, lawyers, mailmen, firemen, mostly moved out of my home parish but all still in town. Somehow lost track of them. A great joy, since so many friends still in my neighborhood have died. We took about 15 minutes to eat, and talked for two hours and had a few beers. I almost said we should meet once a week, but it wasn't my place as a newcomer. I need to stay active, Doctor, because my wife needs me. Doc, life is good, and I'd like to make a few more of these lunches before the good Lord takes me."
God Bless America. And God bless him. No, he did not need me as a shrink: I need some more of what he's got: the true American spirit. One secret: we psychiatrists are more blessed by what we get from our patients than by what we have to give.
Details altered just barely enough for confidentiality (not that he would mind, but he would be embarassed by admiration and attention) - but not the 320th BG - that is accurate.
The New York that welcomed Alexander Hamilton had its own distinctive culture, too, whose uniqueness went far deeper than John Adams’s description of a town where “they talk very fast, very loud, and all together.” Its Dutch past, from Peter Minuit’s 1626 purchase of Manhattan to Peter Stuyvesant’s handover of the flourishing New Netherland colony to the British in 1664, left an indelible legacy. After decades of brutish religious war, the Dutch Republic had embraced tolerance with fervor and transplanted to its trading post on the Hudson its constitutional promise that “each person shall remain free, especially in his religion, and no one shall be persecuted or investigated because of his religion.” So, for example, when Governor General Stuyvesant wanted to limit the rights of 23 Jews who sought asylum in New Amsterdam in 1654, they petitioned the Dutch authorities, who commanded Stuyvesant to treat them with Dutch tolerance, reminding him also that Jews were big investors in the West India Company. And then—as if Jews weren’t bad enough—Quakers appeared in the Long Island village of Vlissingen. When Stuyvesant forbade the villagers, mostly English, from taking them in, they disobeyed, citing in their 1657 “Flushing Remonstrance,” one of the foundation documents of American religious liberty, the Dutch principle that “love peace and libertie” must extend even to “Jewes Turkes and Egiptians” and reminding him of their charter, which granted the right “to have and Enjoy the Liberty of Conscience, according to the Custome and manner of Holland.”
And so New Amsterdam became a melting pot like no other place in North America, with settlers arriving from all over the globe and not only living side by side but also marrying each other.
No sooner had humanity emerged from a century of hot and cold wars than Fukuyama was resurrecting Nietzsche’s admonition that a world of peace and prosperity would be a world of Last Men. “The life of the last men is one of physical security and material plenty, precisely what Western politicians are fond of promising their electorates,” he pointed out. “Should we fear that we will be both happy and satisfied with our situation, no longer human beings but animals of the species homo sapiens?”
While Fukuyama appreciates the seriousness of the Nietzschean warning, he hears it from the perspective of a partisan, not a foe, of liberalism. The danger he foresees is not simply that bourgeois democracy will cause human beings to degenerate, but that degenerate human beings will be unable to preserve democracy. Without the sense of pride and the love of struggle that Fukuyama, following Plato, calls thymos, men—and there is always an implication that thymos is a specifically masculine virtue—cannot establish freedom or protect it:
It is only thymotic man, the man of anger who is jealous of his own dignity and the dignity of his fellow citizens, the man who feels that his worth is constituted by something more than the complex set of desires that make up his physical existence—it is this man alone who is willing to walk in front of a tank or confront a line of soldiers. And it is frequently the case that without such small acts of bravery in response to small acts of injustice, the larger train of events leading to fundamental changes in political and economic structures would never occur.
America was Methodist, once upon a time—Methodist, or Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Congregationalist, or Episcopalian. A little light Unitarianism on one side, a lot of stern Calvinism on the other, and the Easter Parade running right down the middle: our annual Spring epiphany, crowned in bright new bonnets.
The average American these days would have trouble recalling the dogmas that once defined all the jarring sects, but their names remain at least half alive: a kind of verbal remembrance of the nation’s religious history, a taste on the tongue of native speakers. Think, for instance, of the old Anabaptist congregations—how a residual memory of America’s social geography still lingers in the words: the Hutterites, Mennonites, and Amish, set here and there on the checkerboard of the nation’s farmland. The Quakers in their quiet meetinghouses, the Shakers in their tiny communes, and the Pentecostals, born in the Azusa Street revivals, like blooms forced in the hothouse of the inner city.
And yet, even while we may remember the names of the old denominations, we tend to forget that it all made a kind of sense, back in the day, and it came with a kind of order. The genteel Episcopalians, high on the hill, and the all-over Baptists, down by the river. Oh, and the innumerable independent Bible churches, tangled out across the prairie like brambles: Through most of the nation’s history, these endless divisions and revisions of Protestantism renounced one another and sermonized against one another. They squabbled, sneered, and fought. But they had something in common, for all that. Together they formed a vague but vast unity. Together they formed America.
and
...somewhere around 1975, the main stream of Protestantism ran dry. In truth, there are still plenty of Methodists around. Baptists and Presbyterians, too—Lutherans, Episcopalians, and all the rest; millions of believing Christians who remain serious and devout. For that matter, you can still find, soldiering on, some of the institutions they established in their Mainline glory days: the National Council of Churches, for instance, in its God Box up on New York City’s Riverside Drive, with the cornerstone laid, in a grand ceremony, by President Eisenhower in 1958. But those institutions are corpses, even if they don’t quite realize that they’re dead. The great confluence of Protestantism has dwindled to a trickle over the past thirty years, and the Great Church of America has come to an end.
And that leaves us in an odd situation, unlike any before. The death of the Mainline is the central historical fact of our time: the event that distinguishes the past several decades from every other period in American history. Almost every one of our current political and cultural oddities, our contradictions and obscurities, derives from this fact: The Mainline has lost the capacity to set, or even significantly influence, the national vocabulary or the national self-understanding.
Joseph Priestly was curious about everything, and one of those things was the gasses coming out of the vats in the brewery next door. But Priestly was much more than that. Smithsonian.
The event in question took place over four days in an obscure building, the Musée Social, just off the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris at the end of August, 1938. Present were some 26 academics, business people and writers, mostly from Europe, but including the American commentator and journalist Walter Lippmann (who, as it turned out, was in Paris on honeymoon at the time). Also in attendance, apart from the young Raymond Aron, were some of Europe's leading economists: Louis Rougier and Jacques Rueff from France, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek of the Austrian School, and two Germans, both living in exile, Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow. Although invited, neither the future Italian President Luigi Einaudi nor the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset was able to attend.
The immediate cause of this coming together was the publication of a French version of Lippmann's An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society by the Librarie de Médicis, the same publisher that had also recently published Rougier's Les Mystiques Economiques and von Mises's anti-collectivist broadside, Socialism. The wider context was the challenge to liberalism and the free market posed by the rise of a generalised state interventionism in the form of planning, corporatism and socialism. Capitalism seemed on the brink of systemic failure and for many it was capitalism itself that was to blame. Its decline and its end appeared inevitable.
But the participants also saw that the challenge they faced was directed against more than simply the liberal economic order and the political democracy born out of the 19th century. "The totalitarian rebellion," Lippmann commented in his introductory remarks to the conference, "attacks the entirety of the Western tradition - its religion, its science, its law, its state, its property, its family, its morality and its conception of the human person." As a matter of urgency, the civilised world had to find a response to an inhuman enemy.
And, like Benda, they saw that intellectuals were aiding and abetting this enemy. Never, Rougier asserted, had the clercs betrayed as much as they were now doing. They denounced the crimes of Hitler and of fascism but remained silent before the Moscow show trials. They called for the socialisation of the economy without understanding that they were weakening democracy and helping dictators. Believing themselves to be the most implacable enemies of tyranny, they were in fact its best allies. They were betraying the very cause that they professed to serve.
Geoffrey Malaterra, who compares Robert Guiscard and his brother to "Joseph and Benjamin of old," says of Roger: "He was a youth of the greatest beauty, of lofty stature, of graceful shape, most eloquent in speech and cool in counsel. He was far-seeing in arranging all his actions, pleasant and merry all with men; strong and brave, and furious in battle."
Thus says Wiki. In 1061, he defeated 35,000 Saracens in the Battle of Cerami in Sicily:
His name came up today not only because Roger is a contributor to Maggie's Farm, but because in researching summer travel we got looking into the history of Malta. It's always interesting to be reminded of the Norman conquest of Southern Italy and of Sicily (which was Moslem at the time) - and of Malta, also Moslem at the time.
Those descendents of Vikings really did get around. Besides conquering England and southern Italy, they even invaded Greece and sailed up the Danube.
You cannot mention the history of Malta without mentioning the knights hospitalers of The Order of St. John, properly known as The Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem. Maybe Gwynnie will sing their praises here some time.
Many sites have linked Mark Boone's TCS essay titled How Republics Die. He begins:
Insofar as an economic downturn has traceable causes, the present recession seems to have origins in the behavior of at least three groups of people: reckless lenders, who encouraged people to spend their money irresponsibly; reckless borrowers, who took their advice and spent well outside the limits of need and the ability to repay; and a government which at times encouraged such behavior through organizations such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
This is old news to the astute observer and the regular reader of TCS. What they may not know is how vividly, and how long ago, great philosophers warned us just how dangerously our society was using money. The great philosophers understood that economics operates on a moral plane, indeed a spiritual plane; that economic problems are often moral problems; and that financial markets are corrupted as much by bad behavior as by bad economic theory. The antiquity of their advice only serves to belie its strikingly acute contemporary relevance.
In response to my shout-out about MacFarlane's book last weekend, our friend Tom Brewton sent this (which he had posted previously):
The simple, undeniable, and clarion fact is that our personal freedoms came about only, exclusively, and entirely because, centuries before, enough Englishmen had owned enough private property to compel the crown to recognize their rights. When individuals hold the nation’s purse strings, the rulers can’t afford to be too arbitrary.
Evolution of individual property ownership and individual liberties was a process that took place only in England, and it was the very heart of the ethos brought to America by the English colonists.
As Alan Macfarlane (The Origins of English Individualism) explains, England’s traditions of property ownership and the rights of contract, along with its supporting legal system, are historically unique in the world. Only in England did the legal right exist for individuals to own and freely dispose of property. As a consequence, according to accounts by visiting merchants and diplomats from the 15th century onwards, England had a per capita wealth and standard of living, even among the peasant farmers, vastly greater than that of any other European country. It is no accident that the 19th century industrial revolution was more extensive and more effective in England than on the Continent.
Elsewhere in Europe, property was a vague concept based, not on a legal title as in England, but on the feudal tradition of occupancy by generations of the same family. A peasant farm was “owned” by the whole family. No member of the family had any legal way to dispose of any of the property by contract. Every member of the family was entitled by tradition to live on the farm. When a family grew larger, there was less produce from the farm for each member.
The Continental peasant economy was characterized by subsistence farming. Peasant families hardly ever possessed money, but lived by bartering produce at local markets. There was almost no hired labor working for wages. The effect was social and economic stagnation with little prospect for increasing the wealth or living-standards of individuals.
In contrast, England at least as early as the 13th century, around the time that Henry II instituted the common law, had a well developed legal system of individual ownership. Church and court records of the time, both in the rural districts and in the cities, show continual sales of all or parts of farm land and other property by the legal owner, who was always an individual, not a family. Fathers could, and did, disinherit individual children; women owned and sold property in their own name, appearing by legal right to represent themselves in such transactions before the local courts.
The expected pattern in rural England, described by Henry de Bracton in the 13th century (On the Laws and Customs of England), was for sons to leave their families at an early age and hire themselves out as laborers on other farms or in the trades. They usually worked and saved their wages until they had accumulated enough to buy a small farm or business, then they married and began to raise their families. Harder-working and more capable individuals often became well-to-do by continually adding to their property holdings, but there was nothing guaranteed by law or tradition. Indeed, records over several generations in any given local jurisdiction show a constant turnover of family names in the property ownership and tax records. The grandchildren of a wealthy yeoman farmer could easily be poor, if they were not equally hard-working and prudent.
The result of this ethos was an unparalleled degree of economic and political individualism in England, and later in the British North American colonies. For an additional perspective, note the striking contrast between British North America and Latin America, where the Spanish crown originally controlled or owned all property. Latin Americans have never enjoyed the secure personal freedoms found here from the earliest days of the English colonists.
For non-English immigrants to America, especially the millions after the Civil War from historically-feudal Continental Europe, this almost universal private ownership of property was both a jarring social and legal ethos, and, at the same time, the source of their great opportunity for a better life in the New World. Their European heritage led them to identify property ownership with the hereditary landed aristocracy and therefore with repression. They had heard all their lives that liberty was to be taken with armed revolution against existing authority. With no conception of the English heritage of working and saving to accumulate private property over the long term, small numbers of them simply transferred their radical socialism to American soil.
Socrates's idea that reality is unavailable to those who use their senses is what puts him at odds with the common man, and with common sense. Socrates says that he who sees with his eyes is blind, and this idea is most famously captured in his 
Today is Patriot's Day: 
This is a real American story about a true American idol. It's also a story about home-town America, which is, sadly, a disappearing way of true community life.
Vets organization; a WW2 Vet - a gunner in a 
Myron Magnet terms Alexander Hamilton 
From Joseph Bottum at First Things. A quote:
Thanks to Gwynnie, I am entirely absorbed by 
The simple, undeniable, and clarion fact is that our personal freedoms came about only, exclusively, and entirely because, centuries before, enough Englishmen had owned enough private property to compel the crown to recognize their rights. When individuals hold the nation’s purse strings, the rulers can’t afford to be too arbitrary.