As Thanksgiving approaches

For food that stays our hunger,
For rest that brings us ease,
For homes where memories linger,
We give our thanks for these.

Assisted death

In the British Parliament:

MPs are due to vote next week on a private member’s bill to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales. MPs have been given a free vote, meaning individuals rather than parties will decide whether to back or reject the bill. (The Guardian)

Former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown has expressed opposition to the bill:

‘Assisted suicide is an emotive issue where I personally disagree with what is now becoming a majority position…I worry about legislation that requires a doctor whose role has always been to preserve and extend life, to administer death as the final act of a bureaucratic procedure and I worry too about the pressures to agree such a process that in a fit of depression people may choose a course they might later regret and I worry too if older people feel they have become a burden on their relatives and put themselves under pressure to end their life.’

Brown’s decisive intervention this weekend, in his monthly comment piece for the Guardian which opened movingly with the tragic death of his and his wife Sarah’s baby daughter, was carefully thought through. ‘The experience of sitting with a fatally ill baby girl did not convince me of the case for assisted dying; it convinced me of the value and imperative of good end-of-life care,’ he wrote, before going on to call for a commission on improving palliative care instead of a law change. .... (more)

James Macintyre, "Gordon Brown’s assisted dying intervention could be decisive," The Spectator, Nov. 23, 2024.

Nicaea

Philip Jenkins, always worth reading, on "The Nicene Myth," in which he argues that the Council of Nicaea wasn't the inflection point that many historical accounts suggest. Here he describes the council, but the essay is much longer (do read it all, if you have the time):

The story of Nicaea is quickly told. In 312, Constantine consolidated power in the Roman Empire and granted toleration to Christianity the following year. He accepted some leading Christians as his advisors on religious matters and felt the need to demonstrate his leadership of the larger church when it fell into crisis or division.

Such a situation developed in Alexandria, where the presbyter Arius argued that Christ the Son was not fully equal to God the Father. Because the Father was unique in being unbegotten, he must be different from the Son, who was begotten in time, and through whom the Father created the world: “There was a time when He [the Son] was not.” Just how directly these ideas stemmed from any one individual such as Arius is much disputed, but it is rhetorically useful to label any given teaching as the quirky sentiments of one lone individual, rather than a broad intellectual current. It should be noted, though, that Arius was actually not departing too far from views held by eminently respectable earlier thinkers.

Even so, as the Alexandrian church debated the issue, it was Arius personally who attracted the stigma for venturing on dangerous ground, and he was condemned. To resolve the spreading controversy, Constantine summoned a great council from the whole world, the oikou mene, which thus became the church’s first “ecumenical” council.

Between 250 and 300 bishops gathered at Nicaea, representing a minority of the 1,800 or so who then held that office; only five came from the Western church. Tensions ran high during the month or so of debate, and legend holds that Arius was publicly slapped by Bishop Nicholas of Myra—the historical original of Santa Claus. Ultimately, Arius was condemned, with only two bishops prepared to speak up for him. Christ’s full equality with the Father was proclaimed in a new creed, which declared him to be of the same substance, homoousion.

With their mission duly accomplished, the Fathers dispersed to their homes, and every one, we assume, lived orthodox-ly ever after.

That history seems straightforward, and far too much so for many tastes. Through the centuries, Nicaea has become a potent symbol of whatever later believers wished to find: it offers a splendid hook on which to hang whatever trends or facts need to be stigmatized. .... (more)

Jenkins on Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code should convince readers to never rely on thrillers for historical knowledge. Jenkins also addresses, and corrects, errors from other, more serious sources.

Philip Jenkins, "The Nicene Myth," Modern Age, Nov. 18, 2024.

Reading in Bed

Norman Rockwell 1920

Outside the bubble

I didn't vote for President this year but am interested in why things turned out the way they did. More 2024 election data from a graph I came across a few days ago based on exit polling, so it is preliminary given mail-in voting and probably other factors. Indicative, though:

Financial Times

The GOP margin increased for every group in these categories except white college women and voters over 65.

From David Brooks in The New York Times on "Why We Got It So Wrong":

Many of us are walking around with broken mental models. Many of us go through life with false assumptions about how the world works.

Where did we get our current models? Well, we get models from our experience, our peers, the educational system, the media and popular culture. Over the past few generations, a certain worldview that emphasizes racial, gender and ethnic identity has been prevalent in the circles where highly educated people congregate. ....

The crucial assertion of the identitarian mind-set is that all politics and all history can be seen through the lens of liberation movements. Society is divided between the privileged (straight white males) and the marginalized (pretty much everyone else). History and politics are the struggle between oppressors and oppressed groups.

In this model, people are seen as members of a group before they are seen as individuals. When Biden picked his running mate in 2020, he had promised to pick a woman, and when he picked his Supreme Court nominee in 2022, he had promised to pick a Black woman. In both cases her identity grouping came before her individual qualities.

In this model, society is seen as an agglomeration of different communities. Democrats thus produce separate agendas designed to mobilize Black men, women and so on. The goal of Democratic politics is to link all the oppressed and marginalized groups into one majority coalition. ....

This is the idea that a person’s ideas are primarily shaped not by individual preferences but by the experience of the group. It makes sense to say, “Speaking as a gay Hispanic man …” because a person’s thoughts are assumed to be dispatches from a communal experience. ....

It turns out a lot of people don’t behave like ambassadors from this or that group. They think for themselves in unexpected ways.

It turns out that many people don’t see politics and history through the paradigm of liberation movements. They are concerned with all kinds of issues that don’t fit into the good-versus-evil mind-set of oppressor versus oppressed.... (more)

David Brooks, "Why We Got it So Wrong," The New York Times, Nov. 14, 2024.

Voting against

I taught high school political science electives for over three decades. That didn't make me a political scientist. I am actually skeptical of the possibility of political "science." But I like analysis that seems to understand voter behavior. Today I read Yuval Levin on what the Presidential election results likely do not mean. Some excerpts:

The immediate aftermath of an election is a terrible time for political punditry. Everything the winner did looks brilliant, everything the loser did looks dumb, and even widely predicted results feel shocking when they actually materialize. There is no way to avoid these analytical vices, but maybe one way to minimize them is to think about what isn’t all that different or surprising about the outcome—and to trace out what the election doesn’t seem to mean. ....

Approaching this election from that angle first of all clarifies the continuity of our peculiar political era. The 2024 election was very much of a piece with our 21^st-century politics: It was a relatively narrow win owed almost entirely to negative polarization.

Preliminary exit polls reveal an electorate deeply unhappy with the status quo, just as in the last several elections. Voters were not so much excited about what Donald Trump was offering as they were upset at Joe Biden (and by extension Kamala Harris) for mishandling key public challenges, and above all the economy. ....

The exit polls suggest that family policy wasn’t high on voters’ minds in this election. Ukraine, one way or another, was not a priority either. The constituency for dispatching Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take fluoride out of our drinking water is non-existent. People around Trump—even in the more distant reaches of his camp—are all inclined to think they’ve won a mandate for their pet cause even though voters have no idea who they are or what they want, and likely wouldn’t be on board if they did. Most of what Trump himself is most eager to do, from mass deportations to steep tariffs, would likely prove fairly unpopular when actually put into practice.

This is the trap that our 21^st-century presidents have tended to fall into. They win elections because their opponents were unpopular, and then—imagining the public has endorsed their party activists’ agenda—they use the power of their office to make themselves unpopular. ....

It would therefore also be a mistake to imagine that this election victory is an endorsement of Donald Trump’s character and behavior. In the exit polls, just 43 percent of the electorate said Trump has the moral character to be president. Fifteen percent of his own voters said he didn’t. And 67 percent of voters blamed him for the violence at the Capitol after the last election. ....

Of course, seeing what this election does not mean should not take away from what it does mean. This win has put Trump at the peak of his power. Its achievement and reach should not be underestimated, and its implications for the future of American politics are quite significant. But a peak is followed by decline, and Trump’s win does not mean that he is the future of the right or of our politics. He will return to the White House as a 78-year-old lame duck, and he has not brought American politics out of its 21^st-century deadlock. That work will have to follow in his wake. (more, possibly behind a subscription wall)

Yuval Levin, "What Trump’s Win Doesn’t Mean," The Dispatch, Nov. 11, 2024.

November 11

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918 an armistice, ending combat between the armed forces of the Allied Powers and Imperial Germany. The day is observed variously as Armistice Day, Veterans Day, or Remembrance Day. It is a day to honor all veterans, living or dead. When I was in elementary school the class paused for a minute of silence at eleven o'clock.

When a Progressive is illiberal

When I studied American history in high school and college Woodrow Wilson was taught as one of the great Progressive Presidents. Opinions have changed. Blaska's blog pointed me to a review of a biography of Wilson. Quoting from that review:

The Wilson depicted by Mr. Cox didn’t simply hold conventional views on race and sex that later generations would find offensive. He was deeply committed to the doctrine of white racial superiority and had unyielding contempt for the intellectual abilities of women. He was also, according to this assiduously researched biography, inveterately dishonest, hopelessly pretentious, cruel to the women he professed to love, heartless in the face of human suffering, humorless except when doing bad imitations of Southern blacks, indifferent to constitutional constraints, and utterly third-rate as a thinker and scholar. His chief merits, in Mr. Cox’s account, were an ability to say just enough to assure interlocutors of his good intentions without committing himself to any course of action, and an ability to look and sound—as we would say—presidential. ....

Wilson took a dim view of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Throughout his life he preferred Britain’s parliamentary system, in which the party in power does what it wants with few restraints, to America’s system of checks and balances. In 1911, as the governor of New Jersey, Wilson delivered a speech in which he asserted that the opening phrases of the Declaration—that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”—were mere rhetorical flourishes, not to be taken seriously. ....

At the president’s April 1913 cabinet meeting, Postmaster General Albert Burleson suggested that the time had come to introduce segregation “in all Departments of the Government.” This, Burleson said, would be “best for the negro.” The president agreed, and soon restrooms and dining halls throughout Washington were labeled “white” and “colored”; black officials at Treasury and elsewhere—appointed by Wilson’s Republican predecessor, William Howard Taft—found themselves demoted or their positions eliminated. ....

That Wilson has largely escaped vilification by liberal historians is no doubt a consequence of the Progressive-era reforms accomplished during his eight years in office (1913-21): the creation of the Federal Reserve System and the Federal Trade Commission; the passage of the income tax and child-labor laws. Wilson’s leading role in the founding of the League of Nations during the Paris Peace Conference in 1919-20 has earned him the approbation of liberal internationalists and other advocates of transnational governance.

The usually unstated view seems to be that Wilson’s white supremacy and disdain for women were departures from his progressive outlook. ....

Was there a contradiction, though? At the core of progressivism, both in its original form and in the present day, is the belief that most people lack the wisdom to govern themselves and require a class of educated elites to organize society according to a shifting set of ideals. Wilson’s warped ideas on race and sex weren’t departures from progressivism but variant expressions of it. .... (more)

From Birth of a Nation, a film that gloried the KKK, and that Wilson had shown in the White House

 Barton Swaim, "Woodrow Wilson Review: Liberty Limited," The Wall Street Journal, Nov. 8, 2024.

Read "The Lord of the Rings"

Five Books recommends reading Tolkien because the books are a different experience than the films:

These are stories of adventure that have the epic feel that the movies capture, but against a backdrop of conviviality and the pleasures of eating, drinking and telling stories by the fireside as you gather with your companions. Notably, the books are filled with poems that are composed and told by the main characters and pay homage to an oral storytelling tradition that has largely disappeared from our culture but Tolkien clearly admired.

The Hobbit is the recommended first read. I have known people who could not get through it and consequently went no further. I did read it first and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The Hobbit introduces the creature known as a hobbit, about half the height of a human, beardless, and with hairy feet. In particular, the book introduces the figure of Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit in his 50s who enjoys eating, smoking his pipe and taking it easy, and who is very emphatically NOT in search of an adventure. Unfortunately, a visit from Gandalf, a wizard, and 13 dwarves changes all that. Mr Baggins is dragged off from his comfortable home on a quest to recover a treasure.

The Hobbit is fun and light-hearted but has a slightly two-dimensional feel—featuring elves, goblins and dragons: creatures you might expect in a magical story for kids. It does not yet have the epic and ‘real’ feel of The Lord of the Rings. However, it’s in The Hobbit that a magical ring first makes its appearance, as does the creature who is obsessed with it—called Gollum because of the strange noise he makes in his throat when he talks. It’s clear that the ring’s power and the role it would play in the narrative of The Lord of the Rings had yet to take shape in Tolkien’s mind.

Continue "Lord of the Rings Books in Order" here. If you have read the books there are no surprises. But the descriptions may intrigue those who haven't without giving too much away.

"Lord of the Rings Books in Order," Best Books for Kids, Nov. 2, 2024.

All Saints

From a few years ago, a few thoughts about the significance of All Saints' Day:

For over a thousand years, many Christians have celebrated November 1 as All Saints’ Day. In America, the day is best known for the preceding day: All Hallows’ Eve or Halloween. On Halloween we try to scare each other and dress up as what we are not. On All Saints’ Day, we encourage each other by remembering who we are. ....

Like any holiday, All Saints’ Day means various things to various people. Holidays are like that. They carry many meanings. As I see it, All Saints’ Day has three themes: (1) the union of all Christians, living and dead, in one organism, the body of Christ, (2) the inspiring example of other Christians, especially those who have died, and (3) remembering those who are no longer physically with us. ....

For me, there are two essentials for worship on All Saints’: the collect (or opening prayer) for All Saints’ Day and singing six or more stanzas (to Ralph Vaughn Williams’s tune) of William How’s hymn “For All the Saints.” ....

Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

.... All Saints’ Day is a day when we remember that we are by God’s grace one body in Christ Jesus, united with Christians around the world and in heaven in praising and serving God. .... (more)

David Bains, "All Saints’ Day: Three Themes," Samford University, Oct. 28, 2020.

The great cloud of witnesses

October 31st is Reformation Day and the day following is All Saints' Day: 

Reformation Day is the anniversary of Martin Luther's challenge to debate his 95 theses—not the beginning of the Reformation but an important point in it. Halloween is All Hallows Eve, the evening before All Saints’ Day. Days were thought of as evening to evening so the eve was the beginning of the next day—think New Year’s Eve or Christmas Eve. Although today most approach it as a secular holiday that wasn’t its origin and for Protestants, all believers are “saints” and All Saints’ Day is when we acknowledge “the great cloud of witnesses” who have passed on. So on Halloween, we can celebrate both the Protestant Reformation and all those believers who have gone before.

Therefore being justified by faith,
we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ:
By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand,
and rejoice in hope of the glory of God.

Romans 5:1-2 [KJV]

The sky is falling

I would describe myself as a philosophical pessimist, but a temperamental optimist. As the election approaches an argument against despair:

Some Americans will wake up next Wednesday in despair. Half the country—or at least a sizable part of the losing half—will feel that all is lost, every ounce of their hope and hard work has been wasted. The candidates themselves trade on these themes. ....

Both sides are treating this election as a potential apocalypse. Everything is on the line. The party is over for good if the wrong party wins. But is it? Is the American experiment really so close to the edge?

Not from where I’m sitting. If you zoom out—and I mean way out—things are going pretty well in the land of the free and the home of the brave. We are on the cusp of our 250th birthday. We still have our republican form of government, our Constitution and Bill of Rights, despite some close calls. Roughly 2% of the population lost their lives in the Civil War—the equivalent of 6.5 million people today. In the 20th century we made it through two world wars, a great depression, the assassination of two presidents and the resignation of another, the trauma of Vietnam and the fall of communism. Even after all that we stood tall as the world’s sole superpower.

Sept. 11, 2001, didn’t kill us. Neither did the housing collapse nor the financial crisis. We beat Covid. We even survived the ugly Trump administration and its uglier backlash. ....

Something about how our Founders went about their work has set us up for centuries of success, and the end isn’t remotely in sight. There’s life left in Lady Liberty, plenty of it. The United States of America is still the last best hope on earth.

All the evidence you need is piling up at the southern border. People from everywhere risk everything to get here—to work, to raise their children, to make a future. China doesn’t have this problem.

If you’re a candidate for high office, there may be some political value in running around with your hair on fire, shouting like a street preacher about the end of democracy and the loss of the country. The stakes are highest during the waning days of a losing campaign. But don’t fall for it. The pendulum always swings. All is never lost. .... (more)

Matthew Hennessey, "The Election Will End. The World Won’t," The Wall Street Journal, Oct. 30, 2024.

Conservatism in the wilderness

In a recent Facebook comment I indicated that I was a conservative, and consequently most often voted for Republican candidates. I'm not planning to vote for President this year—neither candidate promises to deal with the most pressing problems endangering the Republic. Neither do I have any confidence in their character or competence. Charles C.W. Cooke is dispirited by the prospects of the next four years, whichever candidate wins the Presidency, but he is less pessimistic over the long term:

For a conservative classical liberal such as myself, this election season has been alarming and grotesque, and I am convinced that, one way or another, we are destined to pay a price for it. But I do not worry about conservatism in the longer term, because I believe that the central insights of conservatism are correct. Human nature is immutable. The world is a dangerous place. Ambition must be channeled productively. We cannot spend more than we make. There are no solutions, only settlements. Equality under the law is superior to the alternatives. Practice is a better indicator of success than theory. Power corrupts less when it is shared between competing institutions. Government ought to be as close to the people as possible. That which cannot go on forever will stop. From time to time we take a vacation from these truths, but a vacation is all it can be, for, eventually, reality will kick in — yes, even in Washington, D.C. (more)

Charles C.W. Cooke, "Will Conservatism Recover?," National Review, Oct. 24, 2024.

When things fall apart

Every Sunday at The Free Press Douglas Murray writes about "Things Worth Remembering." This Sunday his choice is from T.S. Eliot's play, Murder in the Cathedral:

.... In the time between its first staging, in 1935, and the completion of The Waste Land in 1922, Eliot had recovered somewhat from the fragmented mindset that had defined his early work—though he would spend the rest of his life periodically confronting despair. His personal revival was in large part, or perhaps entirely, due to a personal religious revival. He converted to Anglican Christianity in 1927.

Murder in the Cathedral is shot through with the struggle against hopelessness. It is a dramatization of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, who was the archbishop of Canterbury in the twelfth century. History tells us that he clashed with England’s reigning king, Henry II, as church and state so often do. Many suspect that it was at the orders of the monarch that Becket was assassinated in 1170—in Canterbury Cathedral. ....

Murder in the Cathedral has lines as memorable as the most memorable lines of his poetry. The soon-to-be martyred Becket receives this warning, for instance, from a narrator, known as one of the Tempters, who come along to test him:

The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

These lines require some thinking about.

But there is one passage from Murder in the Cathedral that I often think about, and sometimes say to myself. It is spoken by Becket, in a meeting with another of his Tempters. And although it may seem bleak, it is, to my mind, somewhat consoling:

We do not know very much of the future
Except that from generation to generation
The same things happen again and again.
Men learn little from others’ experience.
But in the life of one man, never
The same time returns. Sever
the cord, shed the scale. Only
The fool, fixed in his folly, may think
He can turn the wheel on which he turns.

We always live in tumultuous times. That seems to me to be the nature of things. As Eliot’s fellow convert, C.S. Lewis, said—in another speech I have quoted in this series—even the historical eras that seem most placid turn out, on closer inspection, to have been filled with alarms and crises. .... (more)

Douglas Murray, "Things Worth Remembering: T.S. Eliot Put His World Back Together Again," The Free Press, Oct. 27, 2024.

None of the above

I seldom post about partisan politics here, but as the election approaches I've been thinking a lot about the Presidential contest. I actively dislike both major party candidates and have been debating whether to even vote for President. I never had that problem before 2016. Sometimes I was authentically enthusiastic about a candidate — although the last time was long ago. Usually, I have had little difficulty discerning what seemed to me the lesser evil. Today, I encountered Lionel Shriver's "America’s last undecided voter." Her concerns are mine. I wouldn't go so far as saying I'm a "double hater." I don't hate either candidate, but I don't think either should be President. Whoever wins, it will be a very long four years.

I’ve watched fellow ‘double haters’ squirm in print. There are two models for wrestling with this dilemma, one exemplified by Andrew Sullivan. The conservative commentator ‘came out’ in a September Substack newsletter – no, not in that dated sense: everyone knows he’s gay – in support of Kamala Harris, only to lavish the overwhelming majority of that column on what a ghastly candidate she is. ....

Academically, I profoundly sympathise with Andrew’s contention that any former president who has hindered the peaceful transfer of power, and any candidate who refuses to commit to accepting the results of the election, has invalidated himself for high office. But I am so blindingly bored by countless hysterical screeds decrying the character of Donald Trump and deploring the guy as a ‘threat to democracy’ that I’m loath to subject you to more of the same. For what gets less play is the ‘Democratic’ party’s threat to democracy.

Granted, our friend Kamala is an empty pantsuit, insecure and at least subconsciously aware that she’s in this thing way over her head. So if she wins, her presidency will likely be titular. She will do as she’s told by the same handlers who controlled her senile predecessor, and her administration will pursue four more years of roughly the same progressive policies. That makes her sound like the safer bet. But continuing the same policies is only safe if those policies were ever safe, and there’s nothing safe about four more years of wilful self-destruction. ....

...[S]ince when did Democrats care about the constitution? Supreme Court packing, Senate packing with new, Democratically controlled states (DC and Puerto Rico) and backhandedly abolishing the Electoral College all happily rattle in their bag of prospective tricks. The party has shamelessly weaponised the judicial system to keep Trump off the ballot or throw him in jail, which is creepy even to people like me who despise the guy. Democratic refusal to prosecute shoplifting abandons the state’s protection of private property. The Biden administration has systematically pressured social media companies to censor or suppress commentary unfriendly to government policy; Harris has never distanced herself from such violations of the First Amendment. ....

I detest Kamala Harris. Empty, incapable and dim, she’d make for a piss-poor specimen to break the ultimate glass ceiling. To the degree that she has any real convictions, I share few of them. With thanks to Holden Caulfield, I simply can’t bring myself to publicly plump for such a phony. I also can’t bring myself to publicly back Donald Trump. I vowed long ago to never, ever burden myself reputationally with supporting that clown on the record.

I’ve been in a state of paralysis this whole campaign season. I find it impossible to determine which victorious candidate could turn out to be worse. I accept that neutrality amounts to cowardice. Still, at the risk of appearing pathetic, for now I’m sitting this one out. I at least share Gerard Baker’s certainty in the Wall Street Journal this week that my country will survive either terrible president, a fragile confidence which these days has to pass for optimism. (more)

Lionel Shriver, "America’s last undecided voter," The Spectator, Oct. 26, 2024.

"Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear..."

Jake Meador, on Tolkien's view of moral responsibility. This was published in September and I missed it.

.... There is a simplicity about Tolkien’s moral vision that is refreshing. Certainly, there are times when the answer to the right course of action is not altogether plain, and wisdom and prudence are needed to help one see the right way. But if honour compels one toward a certain action, come what may, then nothing else matters—at least not for Tolkien.

We might stumble over the centrality of honour because Tolkien draws on a moral vision largely forgotten in our day. But the wise elders of old understood that when an individual faced a question of right and wrong, they were also facing a question of honour and dishonour. ....

For Tolkien, the demands of honour wed to wisdom and prudence are generally the only demands on us when we consider what we ought to do. History is simply the stage on which we act, playing our part well or poorly. Our feet are set down at some moment in time by forces entirely outside our control, and we must decide how to walk. As the wizard Gandalf counsels elsewhere in Lord of the Rings, “All we have to do is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us.” But this is not how many of us think about the relationship between time and moral choice. Rather than the space in which we make choices, history has come to be one of the central inputs that informs our choices, competing with the claims of honour as defined by the moral law.

Consider the ways in which both the Right and the Left now routinely avail themselves of what might be called “the appeal to the calendar.” The Left, including former president Barack Obama, have long spoken of the possibility of being “on the wrong side of history,” as if history itself is a moral force that calls us to certain choices and will judge us should we choose wrongly. Yet the Right makes its own appeal to the calendar. Any number of moral horrors are tolerated and justified through the claim that the offending party “knows what time it is,” and therefore must be allowed or even encouraged. ....

Tolkien did not think much of such “historical” arguments. In The Two Towers, Éomer, the prince of Rohan, says to Aragorn, the rightful king of Gondor, “It is hard to be sure of anything among so many marvels. The world is all grown strange.... How shall a man judge what to do in such times?” To which Aragorn replies, “As he ever has judged. Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.” While Tolkien certainly had a category for complex moral problems and possessed a deep understanding of the need for wisdom in approaching moral difficulties, he had no category whatever for engaging in evil to secure good ends. One’s moment in history did not let one off the hook of acting with honour. ....

Our hope is never to vanquish evil altogether, for we cannot do that. But we can act, as Tolkien says in The Return of the King:

Other evils there are that may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

Those who wish to fight the long defeat well know that the “weather” facing future peoples is not ours to rule. But we can uproot what evils we encounter in hopes that our children and grandchildren might see a more fruitful crop than we ourselves ever shall ..... (more)

Jake Meador, "The Long Defeat of History," Comment, Sept. 5, 2024.

Equality

"Equality" is an essay by C.S. Lewis that appeared in The Spectator on 27 August 1943:

I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. And whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure. I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people—all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumours. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters. ....

Every intrusion of the spirit that says ‘I’m as good as you’ into our personal and spiritual life is to be resisted just as jealously as every intrusion of bureaucracy or privilege into our politics. Hierarchy within can alone preserve egalitarianism without. Romantic attacks on democracy will come again. We shall never be safe unless we already understand in our hearts all that the anti-democrats can say, and have provided for it better than they. Human nature will not permanently endure flat equality if it is extended from its proper political field into the more real, more concrete fields within. ....

C.S. Lewis. Present Concerns, HarperCollins, 1986.

"The echo of a tune we have not heard"

From a C.S. Lewis sermon delivered Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford, on June 8, 1942:

In speaking of this desire for our own far-off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. ....

C.S. Lewis, "The Weight of Glory," 1942 (pdf)

A repellent thinker

Whittaker Chambers inoculated me against Ayn Rand. So, unlike many other male adolescents my age, I never bothered to read her big books. Today I enjoyed reading this about her and her "ideas." A few excerpts from "Atlas Schlepped":

Rand’s fiction closely resembles Soviet socialist realism except for preaching the opposite politics. Call it capitalist realism. In the most perceptive article on Rand I have encountered, Anthony Daniels claimed, without much exaggeration, that “her work properly belongs to the history of Russian, not American, literature.”

In the 1950s and 1960s, Rand’s novels and essays achieved enormous popularity. Ayn Rand clubs sprang up on college campuses; a handful of influential figures, most notably Alan Greenspan, the future chair of the Federal Reserve, were at one time her disciples; and her books have sold tens of millions of copies. Although serious scholars and journals regarded her novels as devoid of literary merit, they felt obliged to argue with them. For a while, there was no escaping Ayn Rand. ....

Rand differed from the radicals on one key issue. For them, socialism solved all questions; for her, it was capitalism. In almost all other respects, their views coincided. Both embraced militant atheism and regarded religion as the main source of evil, for Marxist radicals because it was “the opiate of the masses” and for Rand because it preached “irrationalism” and altruism.

In Soviet thinking, radical materialism entailed a centrally planned economy presided over by an omniscient Communist Party. In rejecting government for “pure capitalism,” Rand was closest to the Russian anarchist tradition. There is no government in Galt’s Gulch, the utopian community of industrialists described in Rand’s last novel Atlas Shrugged. “We have no laws in this valley,” Galt explains, “no rules, no formal organization of any kind.... But we have certain customs, which we all observe.” The Soviet Union regarded Communism, symbolized by the hammer and sickle, as the ultimate social system. Galt’s Gulch features a dollar sign three feet high, and when Rand died, her body lay in a funeral home beside one twice that size. ....

Is it any surprise that Rand strongly appealed to bright teenage boys? As comic book writer John Rogers remarked, “There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

With ambiguity and compromise characterized as moral treason, Rand’s novels feature principled heroes and dastardly villains, just like socialist realist fiction. In The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, Rand argued for what Soviet theorists called “the positive hero,” the perfectly virtuous person who speaks the indubitable truth. Rand’s novels all contain such spokesmen, typically male, who display the physique of a Greek god, the nobility of a hero, and the charisma accompanying absolute self-confidence. ....

...Jews should be grateful that Rand did everything possible to conceal her background. The less this terrible author of lifeless prose and repellent ideas owes to Judaism, the better.

Assign her instead to the Russian tradition, which features so many repellent thinkers that Rand’s ideas can cause no measurable damage. Neither can her fiction much diminish the glories of Russian literature. A canon including Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov can hardly be marred by a few puerile novels. Atlas Shrugged, remarked Dorothy Parker, “is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.” (more)

Gary Saul Morson, "Atlas Schlepped," Jewish Review of Books, Fall, 2014.

Aging

I enjoyed this from Patrick Kurp:

I’m reminded of my age only when someone holds a door open for me (That’s my job!) or performs some other courtesy. I was returning to my car from the university library, carrying a canvas tote bag of books, walking with the aid of my cane, as usual, when a young man asked if he could carry them for me. A complicated set of reactions: 1). That’s what a boy asks a girl. 2). Do I look like a cripple? 3). Thoughtfulness and good manners aren’t extinct after all.

The essential image of ourselves we carry around with us doesn’t really age. We’re simultaneously twelve, forty-three and whatever age we happen to be at the moment. I’ve known too many who are preoccupied with getting older, an obsession now exploited by multiple industries. .... (more)

Patrick Kurp, "'An Echo of a Song a Stranger Sang'," Anecdotal Evidence, Oct. 6, 2024