The Little Red Blog

Sunday Sermon: How It All Started

Synopsis of “It’s a Good Life,” Episode 73 of The Twilight Zone, first aired in 1961:

Six-year-old Anthony Fremont has godlike mental powers, including mind-reading. He has isolated his town of Peaksville, Ohio, from the rest of the universe. The people must thus grow their own food, and supplies of common household items, such as bar soap, have been dwindling. He has blocked television signals and caused cars not to work. He creates horrible creatures, such as three-headed gophers, which he then kills. Everybody is under his rule, even his parents. The people live in fear of him, constantly telling him how everything he does is "good", since he banishes anyone thinking unhappy thoughts into the otherworldly cornfield from which there is no return. Never having experienced any form of discipline, Anthony does not even understand that his actions are wrong; he is confused when his father tells him that the neighbors are reluctant to let their children play with him after he sent several of his playmates to the cornfield. ¹

From “The Infancy Gospel of Thomas”:

Boyhood deeds of our Lord Jesus Christ

I, Thomas the Israelite, am reporting to you, all my non-Jewish brothers and sisters, to make known the extraordinary childhood deeds of our Lord Jesus Christ - what he did after his birth in my region. This is how it all started:

When this boy, Jesus, was five years old, he was playing at the ford of a rushing stream. He was collecting the flowing water into ponds and made the water instantly pure. He did this with a single command. He then made soft clay and shaped it into twelve sparrows. He did this on the sabbath day, and many other boys were playing with him.

But when a Jew saw what Jesus was doing while playing on the sabbath day, he immediately went off and told Joseph, Jesus' father: "See here, your boy is at the ford and has taken mud and fashioned twelve birds with it, and so has violated the sabbath." So Joseph went there, and as soon as he spotted him he shouted, "Why are you doing what's not permitted on the sabbath?"

But Jesus simply clapped his hands and shouted to the sparrows: "Be off, fly away, and remember me, you who are now alive!" And the sparrows took off and flew away noisily. The Jews watched with amazement, then left the scene to report to their leaders what they had seen Jesus doing.

The son of Annas the scholar, standing there with Jesus, took a willow branch and drained the water Jesus had collected. Jesus, however, saw what had happened and became angry, saying to him, "Damn you, you irreverent fool! What harm did the ponds of water do to you? From this moment you, too, will dry up like a tree, and you'll never produce leaves or root or bear fruit." In an instant the boy had completely withered away. Then Jesus departed and left for the house of Joseph. The parents of the boy who had withered away picked him up and were carrying him out, sad because he was so young. And they came to Joseph and accused him: "It's your fault - your boy did this."

Later Jesus was going through the village again when a boy ran and bumped him on the shoulder. Jesus got angry and said to him, "You won't continue your journey." And all of a sudden, he fell down and died. Some people saw what had happened and said, "Where has this boy come from? Everything he says happens instantly!" The parents of the dead boy came to Joseph and blamed him saying, "Because you have such a boy, you can't live with us in the village, or else teach him to bless and not curse. He's killing our children!"

So Joseph summoned his child and admonished him in private, saying, "Why are you doing all this? These people are suffering and so they hate and harass us." Jesus said, "I'll keep quiet for your sake. But those people must take their punishment." There and then his accusers became blind. Those who saw this became very fearful and at a loss. All they could say was, "Every word he says, whether good or bad, has become a deed - a miracle even!"

When Joseph saw that Jesus had done such a thing, he got angry and grabbed his ear and pulled very hard. The boy became infuriated with him and replied, "It's one thing for you to seek and not find; it's quite another for you to act this unwisely. Don't you know that I don't really belong to you? Don't make me upset."

A teacher by the name of Zacchaeus was listening to everything Jesus was saying to Joseph, and was astonished, saying to himself, "He is just a child, and saying this!" And so he summoned Joseph and said to him, "You have a bright child, and he has a good mind. Hand him over to me so he can learn his letters. I'll teach him everything he needs to know so as not to be unruly."

Joseph replied, "No one is able to rule this child except God alone. Don't consider him to be a small cross, brother."

When Jesus heard Joseph saying this he laughed and said to Zacchaeus, "Believe me, teacher, what my father told you is true. I am the Lord of these people and I'm present with you and have been born among you and am with you. I know where you've come from and how many years you'll live. I swear to you, teacher, I existed when you were born.”

The Jews who were standing by and heard Jesus marveled and said, "How strange and paradoxical! This child is barely five years old and yet he says such things. In fact, we've never heard anyone say the kind of thing this child does."

Jesus said to them in reply, "Are you really so amazed? Rather, consider what I've said to you. The truth is that I also know when you were born, and your parents, and I announce this paradox to you: when the world was created, I existed along with the one who sent me to you."

The Jews, once they heard that the child was speaking like this, became angry but were unable to say anything in reply. The teacher said to Joseph, "Bring him to the classroom and I'll teach him the alphabet."

Joseph took him by the hand and led him to the classroom. The teacher wrote the alphabet for him and began the instruction by repeating the letter alpha many times. But the child was quiet and did not answer him for a long time. The teacher got angry and struck him on the head. The child took the blow calmly and replied to him, "Your condemnation is great. To you these letters are like a bronze pitcher or a clashing cymbal, which can't produce glory or wisdom because it's all just noise. Nor does anyone understand the extent of my wisdom." When he got over being angry, he recited the letters from alpha to omega very quickly.

Zacchaeus the teacher spoke to those who were present: "I'm utterly bewildered, wretch that I am. I've heaped shame on myself because I took on this child. Take him away, I beg you, brother Joseph. I can't endure the severity of his look or his lucid speech. This child is no ordinary mortal; perhaps he was born before the creation of the world. What sort of womb bore him? What sort of mother nourished him? I don't know. Friends, I've been defeated by a mere child, and so I can only despair and die on account of this child; right now, I can't look him in the face. I ask you, brother Joseph, take him back to your house. What great thing he is - god or angel or whatever else I might call him - I don't know."

The child laughed loudly and said, "Now let the infertile bear fruit and the blind see and the deaf in the understanding of their heart hear: I've come from above so that I might save those who are below and summon them to higher things, just as the one who sent me to you commanded me." When the child stopped speaking, all those who had fallen under the curse were instantly saved. And from then on no one dared to anger him for fear of being cursed and maimed for life.

A few days later Jesus was playing on the roof of a house when one of the children playing with him fell off the roof and died. When the other children saw what had happened, they fled, leaving Jesus standing all by himself. The parents of the dead child came and accused Jesus: "You troublemaker, you're the one who threw him down." Jesus responded, "No, he threw himself down. He just wasn't being careful and leaped down from the roof and died." Then Jesus himself leaped down from the roof and stood by the body of the child and shouted in a loud voice: "Zeno!" - that was his name - "Get up and tell me: Did I push you?" Zeno got up immediately and said, "No, Lord, you didn't push me, you raised me up." Those who saw this were astonished, and the child's parents praised God for the miracle that had happened and worshiped Jesus.

Joseph again resolved that Jesus should not remain illiterate. He took him and handed him over to another teacher. This teacher, of course, knew of the child's previous experience with a teacher and was afraid of him. Still, he wrote out the alphabet and instructed him for quite a while, though Jesus was unresponsive. The teacher became exasperated and hit him on the head. Jesus got angry and cursed him, and the teacher immediately lost consciousness and fell face down on the ground.

The Child returned to Joseph's house. But Joseph was upset and gave instruction to his mother: "Don't let him go outside, because those who annoy him end up dead."

___________________________________

[From The Infancy Gospel of Thomas as translated by Harold Attridge & Ronald F. Hock in the book The Complete Gospels, Harper Collins, ©1992]

¹ It's a Good Life (The Twilight Zone) - Wikipedia

Saturday Lecture: "To secure purity in an impure world"

{What follows is the conclusion of a lengthy address given by Professor Joshua Mitchell at Bethlehem College in March of this year. Mitchell’s talk included references to the Reformation and to Jonathan Edwards and America’s “Great Awakening,” some observations about the French Revolution, the usual sprinkling of quotes from de Tocqueville, and some generalizations about Marxism. ¹ I hope this excerpt is clear enough without that background; if not, I have included a link to the original.}

Joshua Mitchell, from “The Church of the New American Awakening”:

I have here brought together a host of phenomena that many of us now intimate are related, but do not yet grasp are pieces of a larger comprehensive project. Purge words, cancel culture, innocence-signaling, wokeness, Trump Derangement Syndrome, the fixation on “clean” energy, the desire to eradicate “toxic masculinity,” along with claims about the perils of micro-aggressions and unconscious bias—what gathers all these together into a coherent whole is the Church of the New American Awakening that commands our national attention. Its liturgy involves the anxious attempt to secure purity in an impure world, by scapegoating someone or something out there, so that parishioners may declare themselves to be “without blemish or spot” (1 Peter 1:19).

Christians who believe that sin is original, that only Christ is without blemish or spot, can see in the host of phenomena the New American Awakening present a shallow apparition of Christianity itself. It is an incomplete religion. As such, Christians have the antidote to the poison. Most Americans today, however, are nominal Christians, who feel Christian guilt without understanding its depth. For them, original sin and Christ’s sacrificial offering are an embarrassment. They do not have the antidote to the poison; they have only the poison. Some are devout parishioners in the Church of the New Great Awakening, who scapegoat in order to purge the poison. Others stricken by the poison know that the cost of never-ending scapegoating is the destruction of the American regime itself and, so resist.

But with what weapons can they resist? The rhetorical weapons that brought them victory during the Cold War are of little use in this battle. We are not fighting Marxism or the French Revolution and its spiritual heir, Progressivism, those first two incomplete religions to plague the West in the aftermath of the Reformation; we are fighting the third incomplete religion, this time over the meaning of sin and how we achieve redemption.

The fate of the American regime now hangs on the question of whether we can recover the whole of the Christian understanding from which the Church of the New American Awakening offers fragments and pale imitations. For parishioners of this later Church, the redemption of the American regime can only be achieved by the destruction of the American regime. Christianly understood, it would seek the destruction of “the old man” so that “the new, spiritual, man” may emerge (Eph. 4:22-24). These parishioners, however, have something else in mind than a birth unto the spirit.

As it is now being worked through in the soul of America, every major action-item of the political party that houses the Church of the New American Awakening, without exception, intends redemption through destruction. Pushback against national borders; the unwavering insistence that fundamental political and economic transformations are necessary to address Climate Change; the disgust with “dirty” fossil fuels; the demand for wealth redistribution; the suspicion of and outright hostility to the idea of equal treatment under the law, and the resolve that every mediating institution in which citizens gather must be altered so as to become “inclusive”—all of these have at their root the supposition that the nation-state, market commerce, the petrochemicals that fuel it, the conventional generative family, our civic institutions, and our religious institutions are unclean and must be purged.

This is not politics; this is a religious quest to establish a sacrificial offering that takes away the sins of the world. As such, our problem in America today admits of no political solution. Either there will be a Christian reawakening in America that provides a feast to replace the crumbs offered by the Church of the New American Awakening, or America will perish.

America hungers. Who will feed it?

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The Church of the New American Awakening - American Reformer

¹ One of the most noteworthy features of Professor Mitchell’s admittedly virtuoso performance is that he eschews the use of even a single quotation from the people whose ideas he so heatedly denounces; for that matter, he doesn’t even name any of those people. The transcript of his address includes plenty of quotes, but they are either from people Mitchell cites with approval (like Jonathan Edwards and Alexis de Tocqueville) or they are his own inventions, paraphrases disguised in quotation marks as if they were the “words” of someone else. Would Professor Mitchell allow his students to get away with relying so heavily on unsourced material?

Joshua Mitchell is professor of political theory at Georgetown University. His research interest lies in the relationship between political thought and theology in the West. He is also an avid conservationist, committed to stewardship on his small farm on the Eastern Shore, and is working on the development of the next generation of solar-electric sailboats. His most recent book is American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time (Encounter Books).

                               If it was good to be Awakened, why is it bad to be Woke?

Which Laws? Whose Liberty?

{Today's excursion is to the land of Law & Liberty, a website of some distinction.}

Please allow the good folks at Law & Liberty to introduce themselves:

Law & Liberty’s focus is on the classical liberal tradition of law and politics and how it shapes a society of free and responsible persons.

This magazine brings together serious debate, commentary, essays, book reviews, interviews, and educational material in a commitment to examining the first principles of a free society as they appear in law, history, political thought, and other aspects of culture.

For those of you who do not yet have your ideology-decoder ring, “classical liberal” is code today for “conservative”. Law & Liberty features a conservative perspective on the topics it covers; but, of the many conservative sites onto which I venture from time to time, its writers are less hyperbolic and more rhetorically responsible than most.

That said, here are some recent articles from L&L.

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In “Better Things Than Happiness,” Kirstin Anderson Birkhaug learns, thanks to a wise remark from one of her college professors, that happiness is overrated. She then gets around to Aristotle and is introduced to eudaimonia, which, she explains, “refers to a sense of wholeness, of completeness, and of peace. It refers to a flawless harmony between the person and the world outside the person, and of ultimate achievement for the individual. It is happiness, yes, but something bigger and better too—it is perfection: perfect happiness. The lucky few who achieve eudaimonic happiness can do so only after living most of their lives. In fact, Aristotle questions whether any man can experience eudaimonia prior to the moment of death. This is because the perfect happiness of eudaimonia emerges from a life well lived.”

“Call no man happy until he is dead,” advised Aristotle. I am glad that Ms. Birkhaug has learned early that “The way to happiness is through more important things” and that “Happiness is not something totally within human control.” Now she can get on with her life.

Better Things Than Happiness – Kirstin Anderson Birkhaug (lawliberty.org)

(If you’re interested, see also Jennifer Hecht’s book, The Happiness Myth)

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Theodore Dalrymple’s “The Oikophobic Will to Power” picks up on “the phenomenon of oikophobia, the dislike or even hatred of one’s own country.” According to Dalrymple (who is, I should point out, British), oikophobia “now seems so prevalent in western academic and intellectual circles as to be almost an orthodoxy or requirement for acceptance into the intellectual class. Of course, no social trend or phenomenon is entirely new or has an indisputable starting point: for example, George Orwell drew attention to English self-hatred many years ago. But the spread of oikophobia has been of epidemic proportion in late years.”

Since Mr. Dalrymple never identifies the oikophobic individuals he has in mind, it is very hard to take his claims seriously, including his claim about the hidden agenda behind oikophobia:

“Interest in, admiration for, or love of alien cultures, or even a single alien culture, is rarely if ever the reason for oikophobia. The latter is not the belief that, as the opening sentence of Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey puts it, “they order these things better” there, and therefore we must emulate or copy. The oikophobe does not want sharia or Aztec human sacrifice, or any other foreign custom, in his own country. What he wants is power within it, and oikophobia is an instrument to achieve it by delegitimizing those he thinks already have it. He wants to replace one ruling class, as he sees it, with another – his own.”

It is amazing how easily and how accurately people can discern the true motives of their opponents, and how often those motives turn out to be selfish and unprincipled. The lust for power, says Dalrymple, is what drives “the intellectual class,” which believes that the way to their countrymen’s hearts is by openly despising their country.

I’m no expert on oikophobia, but the logic seems a little shaky to me.

The Oikophobic Will to Power – Theodore Dalrymple (lawliberty.org) 

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Spoiler: “Tocqueville’s Worst Fears” were that “the principle of equality, if carried to an illiberal extreme, would culminate in a “tutelary” despotism, in which government, even if elective, would deprive individuals of the freedom to act, aiming to regulate all their actions for the sake of what it “knew” was their good.”

Now you know the point of David Lewis Schaefer’s review of Thomas Piketty’s A Brief History of Equality. Piketty, a French economist, wants more income redistribution and more economic leveling; Schaefer, a Professor of Political Science at the College of the Holy Cross, does not.

More precisely, Schaefer fears, as did Tocqueville, that further equality will come at the price of liberty. As Schaefer puts it:

Piketty is less concerned with promoting either political or individual freedom than he is with building a “state” strong enough to push “to its logical conclusion” the movement towards “real equality” as he conceives it—based, it would appear, on nothing more than an ambitious intellectual’s attraction to abstract principles. This is reminiscent of the armchair, “literary politicians” to whom Tocqueville and Edmund Burke attributed the origins of the terroristic French Revolution. Both Piketty’s principles and his policies are a perfect recipe for achieving Tocqueville’s democratic despotism.

A “perfect recipe”! It would be a shame to let it go to waste, would it not?

Tocqueville’s Worst Fears – (lawliberty.org)

 

Wednesday with Pascal: Why We Can't Have Nice Things

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has refused to submit his weekly essay, saying he is not in the mood for disputation or argumentation of any kind. I have therefore taken it upon myself to provide today’s post.}

Blaise Pascal (from Pensees):

On what shall man found the order of the world which he would govern? Shall it be on the caprice of each individual? What confusion! Shall it be on justice? Man is ignorant of it.

Certainly, had he known it, he would not have established this maxim, the most general of all that obtain among men, that each should follow the custom of his own country. The glory of true equity would have brought all nations under subjection, and legislators would not have taken as their model the fancies and caprice of Persians and Germans instead of this unchanging justice. We should have seen it set up in all the States on earth and in all times; whereas we see neither justice nor injustice which does not change its nature with change in climate. Three degrees of latitude reverse all jurisprudence; a meridian decides the truth. Fundamental laws change after a few years of possession; right has its epochs; the entry of Saturn into the Lion marks to us the origin of such and such a crime. A strange justice that is bounded by a river! Truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on the other side.

Men admit that justice does not consist in these customs, but that it resides in natural laws, common to every country. They would certainly maintain it obstinately, if reckless chance which has distributed human laws had encountered even one which was universal; but the farce is that the caprice of men has so many vagaries that there is no such law.

Theft, incest, infanticide, parricide, have all had a place among virtuous actions. Can anything be more ridiculous than that a man should have the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of the water, and because his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have none with him?

Doubtless there are natural laws; but good reason once corrupted has corrupted all. The result of this confusion is that one affirms the essence of justice to be the authority of the legislator; another, the interest of the sovereign; another, present custom, and this is the most sure. Nothing, according to reason alone, is just in itself; all changes with time. Custom creates the whole of equity, for the simple reason that it is accepted. It is the mystical foundation of its authority; whoever carries it back to first principles destroys it. Nothing is so faulty as those laws which correct faults. He who obeys them because they are just, obeys a justice which is imaginary, and not the essence of law; it is quite self-contained, it is law and nothing more. He who will examine its motive will find it so feeble and so trifling that if he be not accustomed to contemplate the wonders of human imagination, he will marvel that one century has gained for it so much pomp and reverence. The art of opposition and of revolution is to unsettle established customs, sounding them even to their source, to point out their want of authority and justice. We must, it is said, get back to the natural and fundamental laws of the State, which an unjust custom has abolished. It is a game certain to result in the loss of all; nothing will be just on the balance. Yet people readily lend their ear to such arguments. They shake off the yoke as soon as they recognize it; and the great profit by their ruin, and by that of these curious investigators of accepted customs. But from a contrary mistake men sometimes think they can justly do everything which is not without an example. That is why the wisest of legislators said that it was necessary to deceive men for their own good. We must not see the fact of usurpation; law was once introduced without reason, and it has become reasonable. We must make it regarded as authoritative, eternal, and conceal its origin, if we do not wish that it should soon come to an end.

Are We Great Again Yet?

{I apologize for subjecting readers to the following selections from 'American Greatness,' but it could have been worse; I could have chosen to blog about AG's latest screed from Victor Davis Hanson.}

Edward Ring, writing at American Greatness, argues that “everyone in the world [can] achieve the standard of living that we [Americans] take for granted”. Nor is he alone in his enthusiasm:

In April 2022, noted venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson posted the following quote on Facebook: ‘Our goal is to usher in an era of infinite abundance.’

Infinite abundance.

This phrase epitomizes the ongoing promise of California’s tech culture. Despite California’s many political shortcomings, the state’s technology sector continues to set the pace for the rest of the world. ‘Infinite abundance,’ evocative of an earlier tech mantra ‘better, faster, cheaper,’ is not only a defining aspiration of tech entrepreneurs; it is closer to being realized every day.

Next stop, Utopia!

While liberals have accepted the scientific consensus on climate change and have proposed policies—wind and solar energy, electric vehicles, etc.—to deal with the situation, conservatives, when they have not simply denied that a problem exists, have become techno-boosters and believers in “infinite abundance”: enough water, food, land, and energy for everyone, forever. This seems to be out of line with traditional conservatism, which preached limits and emphasized the need for prudence and for thrift; but conservatives today are a different breed.   

In fairness, Edward Ring acknowledges a fundamental difficulty:

Anyone fighting for abundance must nonetheless confront an inescapable fact: Every American on average uses four times as much energy as people in the rest of the world, and they use three times as much water. Furthermore, if anything, the per capita water use for Americans is understated. Nuances can alter the implications of fractional differences, but they cannot explain away multiples of three or four times. Can abundance for everyone be achieved without destroying the planet?

Despite that frank admission, Ring remains undaunted in his can-do American optimism; he never so much as suggests that Americans might have to lower our expectations of perpetual economic growth, much less that we might have to stop being wasteful, gluttonous consumers of the planet’s resources. Instead, Ring waves his magic wand and utters the magical incantation: “Policies that nurture abundance would [produce] leading-edge products and technologies that [would] address an insatiable, wholly justified demand” for more.

I hate to be pedantic, but, by definition, an “insatiable demand” can never be filled. It hardly seems “conservative” to promote insatiable demands; what would Russell Kirk or Michael Oakeshott have to say about such hubris?

Toward Infinite Abundance › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)   

Also at American Greatness, Brandon Weichert worries that we won’t live long enough to enjoy our infinite abundance, because “Biden Is Sleepwalking US into Nuclear War with Russia”. Again, this seems contrary to old-style conservatism, which encouraged American presidents to stand up to Soviet threats despite Moscow’s nuclear arsenal; defending “captive nations” was held, by the Right, to be a moral imperative.

Now, however, “A coterie of Russian officials have indicated their increasing willingness to risk nuclear war with the Americans and their NATO partners if the West does not stop its full-throated support for Ukraine in their endeavors to completely evict the Russian invaders from the embattled country.” Moreover, “The ongoing food, energy, and supply chain crises, as well as the potential for a nuclear world war, are all connected via Ukraine.” Mr. Weichert concedes that “The West was justified in assisting the Ukrainians to prevent a total Russian takeover of their besieged nation.” But enough is enough: “The time has now arrived,” he declares, “for the world’s great powers (namely, the United States) to use its immense power and leverage over the warring parties to end the conflict, restore some semblance of order into the region, and to avert a wider, unnecessary nuclear war with Russia.”

I will go on record as also wanting to avert nuclear war, with Russia or with anyone else. I get the sense, however, that Weichert is more interested in calling attention to Joe Biden’s perceived shortcomings (he calls Biden “frail and forgetful on a good day,” as well as “ignorant and corrupt”) than with serious policy analysis. Democratic Presidents, of course, have long been damned if they do (“Warmonger!”) and damned if they don’t (“Appeasement!”).

Weichert closes on this dire note: “Just as the leaders of Europe in the run up to World War I failed to recognize how their actions or inaction exacerbated the likelihood of total world war, we now need to seriously contemplate the possibility of a nuclear war with Russia over tiny Ukraine.” I am going to hazard a guess that President Biden and his various advisors are aware of the dangers and that they are, and have been, working behind the scenes to find or to broker some solution. That no solution has yet been found does not mean that no one is trying or that one will not be found.

Brandon Weichert takes the position that we tried to help an embattled ally, but now it’s time to throw in the towel; even a superpower can only do so much. He may be right, but it’s odd rhetoric to hear from our usually hawkish Right.

Biden Is Sleepwalking U.S. into Nuclear War with Russia › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)   

Sunday Sermon: "In letters of golden fire"

[S.A. Kapadia (1905): “Nearly 3,500 years ago, at Rae, in Media, there lived a man of the name of Pourushaspa, who, along with his wife, led a holy and righteous life. ¹

“It is related of this holy man that, being desirous of perpetuating his posterity, he prepared a religious ceremony as a thanksgiving to the Almighty, and solemnly prayed for the favor of a child. This worthy man's prayers were duly answered, and a son was born to him, who labored amongst our primitive forefathers for the amelioration of mankind and their deliverance from the everlasting ruin. His mission was prior to the advent of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam.

“He left behind him, written in letters of golden fire, in the History of the World, his illustrious name, Zarathustra, as a permanent landmark and everlasting beacon for the welfare of the body and the guidance of the soul in its passage from the known to the unknown.”]

From The Teachings of Zoroaster:

Commandments for the Body and Soul

The sage asked the Spirit of Wisdom thus: "How is it possible to seek maintenance and prosperity of the body without injury of the soul, and the preservation of the soul without injury of the body?"

The Spirit of Wisdom answered thus: "Him who is less than thee consider as an equal, and an equal as a superior, and a greater than him as a chieftain, and a chieftain as a ruler. And among rulers one is to be acquiescent, obedient, and true-speaking; and among accusers be submissive, mild, and kindly regardful.

Commit no slander, so that infamy and wickedness may not happen unto thee. For it is said that slander is more grievous than witchcraft.

Form no covetous desire, so that the demon of greediness may not deceive thee, and the treasure of the world may not be tasteless to thee.

Indulge in no wrathfulness, for a man when he indulges in wrath becomes then forgetful of his duty and good works, and sin and crime of every kind occur unto his mind.

Suffer no anxiety, for he who is a sufferer of anxiety becomes regardless of enjoyment of the world and the spirit, and contraction happens to his body and soul.

Commit no lustfulness, so that harm and regret may not reach thee from thine own actions.

Bear no improper envy, so that thy life may not become tasteless.

Practice no sloth, so that the duty and good work, which it is necessary for thee to do, may not remain undone.

Choose a wife who is of character, because that one is good who in the end is more respected.

Thou shouldst be diligent and moderate, and eat of thine own regular industry, and provide the share of the sacred beings and the good; the practice of this in thy occupation is the greatest good work.

With enemies fight with equity. With a friend proceed with the approval of friends. With a malicious man carry on no conflict, and do not molest him in any way whatever. With a greedy man thou shouldst not be a partner, and do not trust him with the leadership. With an ill-famed man form no connection. With an ignorant man thou shouldst not become a confederate and associate. With a foolish man make no dispute. With a drunken man do not walk on the road. From an ill-natured man take no loan.

In forming a store of good works, thou shouldst be diligent, so that it may come to thy assistance among the spirits.

Thou shouldst not become presumptuous through any happiness of the world; for the happiness of the world is such-like as a cloud that comes on a rainy day, which one does not ward off by any hill.

Thou shouldst not become presumptuous through much treasure and wealth; for in the end, it is necessary for thee to leave all.

Thou shouldst not become presumptuous through great connections and race; for in the end, thy trust is on thine own deeds.

Thou shouldst not become presumptuous through life; for death comes upon thee at last, and the perishable part falls to the ground.

_________________________________________

The Teachings of Zoroaster: Extracts (sacred-texts.com)

¹ Scholars have been unable to ascertain precisely when Zoroaster lived; the best estimates place him somewhere between 1500 BCE and 1000 BCE. By comparison, the oldest books of Hebrew scriptures are estimated to have been composed around 750 BCE.

Saturday Lecture: "Slouching toward ungovernability"

William Ophuls, from Requiem for Modern Politics (1998):

My principal aim is to show that the Enlightenment, in seeking a cure for civilization’s ills, only succeeded in making them worse. Liberal polity is based on intrinsically self-destructive and potentially dangerous principles. It has already failed in its collectivist form and is now moribund in its individualist form as well.

The exploitative economy intimately associated with liberal polity is fraudulent in its premises and is now approaching bankruptcy in both its market and non-market forms. In addition, the merely purposive rationality that helped to create and sustain a liberal polity and an exploitative economy expresses modern man’s will to power and wreaks increasing havoc both on nature and on man himself. The three main components of modern civilization—liberal polity, exploitative economy, and purposive rationality—are riddled with inner contradictions. That civilization is therefore collapsing. As a result, the latent totalitarianism of modern politics is likely to manifest itself with increasing force in the years to come. Without a major advance in civilization, we confront a political debacle.

Modern politics was erected on a premodern foundation, on the legacy of the Middle Ages, an era governed by a philosophy and way of life radically different from that of modernity. [The premodern society] regarded will and appetite as dangers to be combated rather than passions to be indulged. By contrast, liberal theory and practice are concerned almost solely with the expedient means toward individual self-expression and self-gratification. To use the image of Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, modern civilization is guilty of ‘spiritual parasitism’: it has relied on Christian virtues while scorning the faith which created and nourished them.

Parasites drain the life from their host. Hence the free play of individual selfishness within the liberal polity has steadily vitiated the very society upon which it utterly depends. In effect, just as modern economies consume the ecological capital of all the ages, so liberal polities destroy themselves by devouring the fund of moral capital, the fund of fossil virtue they inherited from the premodern past. Because liberalism tends ever and always toward moral entropy, it is rapidly exhausting the moral legacy upon which its doctrines and practices are grounded.

The moral entropy that is intrinsic to the liberal order has eroded both the moral legacy of the Middle Ages and the moral rectitude of the Protestant ethic. The upshot is that the morality of liberal society (if we can call it that) becomes increasingly egotistical. Everything is evaluated in terms of costs and benefits to ego, even the most intimate personal ties, and there is little left to hold together basic social relationships, much less civil society. A vicious circle of decay in both morals and mores is propelling us toward a social collapse whose details—crime, broken families, drug addiction, and the like—are so well known as not to need documentation.

When all members of a society live to satisfy their appetites, they are thrown not only into a fierce competition with each other for access to the sources of satisfaction, but into a moral wasteland in which that satisfaction is the ultimate and only value. ¹ Living by liberal premises over the long term fosters a vicious circle of antisocial behavior that tends toward the war of all against all.

The family is the primary arena in which ego learns to moderate its narcissistic demands and harmonize itself with some larger social entity: loyalty, integrity, responsibility, self-control, and the like are all learned primarily in the family setting. In other words, the family is where we acquire civility, the ability to live constructively and well in civil society. If the family fails to model and to inculcate civility or to bind the child to the community, then society is no longer a bulwark against selfishness, becoming instead a mere arena for it—a place where fundamentally amoral and asocial beings struggle for personal advantage with little or no regard for the welfare of others, much less for the public good. The decay of the family portends a bleakly Hobbesian future.

The liberal paradigm of politics unleashed human will and appetite but provided no countervailing source of moral principle strong enough to preserve society from their ravages over the long term. Liberal politics has become an increasingly naked struggle for power played out in a media arena before an electronic mob. The suspicion that we may be slouching toward ungovernability, is growing. 

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William Ophuls - Wikipedia

Although Opuls was (and is) an environmental activist, his scathing critique of liberalism anticipated the 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, by conservative academic Patrick Deneen; it also echoed very similar contemporary criticisms from Christopher Lasch. It is simultaneously liberalism’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness that it can be, and has been, attacked from both ideological sides.

¹ Legendary football coach Vince Lombardi: “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.”

What hath liberalism wrought?

Another Pleasant Valley Thursday

{Greed, gender, dystopian gloom, and hopeful pessimism: bring it on!}

At Current Affairs, which he founded and which he edits, Nathan J. Robinson debunks the idea that either the Invisible Hand of the Market, the Law of Supply and Demand, or any other impersonal economic force drives capitalism; capitalism is fueled by greed. As Robinson explains:

We must reject the idea coming from many wealthy people that, as Jag Bhalla puts it, “unbridled greed is just simple human nature.” (Bhalla says we have accepted a “greedocracy.”) We ought to acknowledge the simple fact that those who try to get more than they need to live a life of basic comfort, have accumulated their luxuries because they have deprived others along the way. This has been done by choice. Everyone could have had plenty, because there is plenty to go around, but decisions are made every day that prevent this outcome. Nobody makes the capitalist maximize profits, or pay their workers less than they pay themselves, and “the market made me do it” is an excuse that should make socialists highly dubious. It is crucial for socialists to understand that human beings are not mere billiard balls whose moral choices are dictated by the systems we are in. We have agency, and that agency confers responsibility. There are no excuses for enriching one’s self and exploiting others.

Is Capitalism Built on Greed? ❧ Current Affairs

In “Why Is the Right So Horrified by Drag Queens?” Nathan Robinson also weighs in on the latest moral panic on the Right. “Pedophiles” and “groomers” are the insults du jour, and conservatives are horrified that children are exposed to “men in thongs,” which leads one to assume that conservatives believe children should not be allowed to go to a public beach. Robinson observes:

It is very interesting that the Right, strict defenders of parental rights when it comes to preventing children from exposure to critical race theory, suddenly starts talking about using criminal law and taking people’s children away if parents take their kids to a drag show. Here we see something fundamental about right-wing politics exposed: it is not actually, despite the endless use of the word “freedom,” about freedom at all. It is about freedom within a very narrowly prescribed range. The moment men start wearing women’s clothes and dancing, we must cover the children’s eyes in case they get infected with unconventional notions about gender roles.

One is tempted to ask, what are these people so afraid of? The obvious answer is, everyone and everything that is not like them.

Why Is the Right So Horrified By Drag Queens? ❧ Current Affairs

At Aeon, Audrey Borowski discusses a modern social philosopher so obscure that even I had not heard of him. Gunther Anders (1902--1992), Borowski informs us, was “a German philosopher and essayist of Jewish descent, whose work bears testimony to some of the 20th century’s major disasters and their effect on the intellectual landscape of the time. Anders set out to theorize those disasters and the impact of technology on modernity and the human condition, in particular technology’s gradual domination over all aspects of human activity – the commodification, dehumanization and even derealization of the world that had resulted from that domination.”

In the shadow of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Anders—like his friend Theodor Adorno—grew ever more skeptical of the Enlightenment and the belief in “progress” that it spawned. His view, as Borowski explains, was that “Much of the recent technological takeover of our lives has been underpinned by the myth that it was synonymous with emancipation and progress – a conceit it was suspect to challenge even while that very imperative further contributed to the growth of inequalities, the destruction of nature and the waste of resources. ‘The real terrorists’ in this regard are the so-called experts in charge who were as ignorant as us but ‘who continuously frighten our common world with the threat of destruction.’ Rather than ‘enlightening’ man, the progress of technology had ended up further anchoring his obsolescence and placing him outside of history.”

Those who find this perspective too gloomy can be cheered by the fact that hardly any of Anders’ writings, including his two-volume The Obsolescence of Humankind, are available in English. Those who find Anders’ view of modernity thought-provoking can thank Audrey Borowski for calling the man to our attention.

Günther Anders, a forgotten prophet for the 21st century? | Aeon Essays

At Aeon, Mara van der Lugt considers the eternal question: Is life’s glass half-empty or half-full? Which is to say, ought we to side with pessimists or with optimists? “Just as the pessimists believe that optimists are deceived in their insistence on the goods of life, so too the optimists think the pessimists’ eyes are skewed towards the bad: each side accuses the other of not having the right vision. The question thus becomes: what is the right vision?”

In her entertaining and wide-ranging essay (from Voltaire to Greta Thunberg), van der Lugt rejects both sunny optimism and gloomy pessimism in favor of a third stance which she calls “hopeful pessimism,” of which she finds Thunberg an exemplar:

If there is hope, it’s a dark, bleak hope, full of rage and grief and pain for what is being lost – but infused also with insistence, perdurance, determination. It is clear that this activist, at least, will continue to strive even if her efforts are doomed to fail. This is not optimism: if anything, it is a hopeful pessimism, and I believe it has every right to be called a virtue in our age.

Hopeful pessimism breaks through the rusted dichotomy of optimism vs pessimism. It is this attitude, this perspective that is exemplified in Thunberg and other figures who by their example give an affirmative answer to the question posed by Paul Kingsnorth: ‘Is it possible to see the future as dark and darkening further; to reject false hope and desperate pseudo-optimism without collapsing into despair?’

In short, the philosopher we need today is Yogi Berra, who famously said “It ain’t over till it’s over.” He is also reputed to have said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” which applies perfectly to our contemporary American predicament.

In these dark times, the virtue we need is hopeful pessimism | Aeon Essays

Wednesday with Pascal: A Utopian Design

{Having previously featured an economic critique of the Old Testament prophets (who allegedly helped ruin the economy of biblical Israel by their calls for redistribution of wealth), Pascal the Russian blue cat (with a dollop of Jewish ancestry) here presents a strikingly different analysis by the late, esteemed Jacob Neusner, unofficially the world’s most prolific author (900 books written or edited).}

“When we examine the political economics of the Mishnah,” wrote Jacob Neusner (in The Economics of the Mishnah), “we gain a clearer picture of the power of economics to serve in the expression and detailed exposition of a utopian design for society.” ¹ We have, in that sentence alone, a significant departure from the numbers-crunching perspective of Professor Morris Silver (Prophets and Markets). Professor Silver examined Old Testament “social justice” prophets in the context of a market economy and found them wanting; Jacob Neusner, however, believed that ancient Israel’s economy was part and parcel of a larger social vision, one he deemed to have been “utopian”. 

The nature of this utopian vision was clear, wrote Neusner:

“In point after point in their system, the framers of the Mishnah declare one conviction. It is that the Israelite world—Jews in Palestine/Israelites in the land of Israel—forms a world unto itself, a world of enduring stasis, in which no significant change will disturb the stable society.”

A static utopia implies, of course, a state of perfection, from which any change can only be for the worse. “This [temporal] world order,” Neusner explained, “attains that enduring, indeed eternal, stasis because it serves to complement and complete that other world order, the one in heaven. In the complementarity and wholeness attained through the union of two opposites—heaven and earth—on the sacred time of the Sabbath and in festivals, creation is renewed; on that account, creation in all its completeness and perfection once more provokes in God the benediction and sanctification of the creator such as the original excellence of creation had elicited.”

Israel was to be a holy people, not necessarily an economic powerhouse. That “fundamental conviction,” Neusner continued, “emphasized the true, intrinsic worth and value of things, the perfect balance in transactions, so that each party to an exchange gets worth equivalent to what he gives, and both parties emerge precisely at the same level of worth as at the outset. The perfection of the steady-state economy is only way in which the systemic principle is expressed in the details of everyday exchange.” Market transactions were not to enable one party to benefit at the expense of the other, and they were conducted under the same protective canopy of justice and equality under which YHWH had placed Israel.

Moreover, wrote Neusner, “The Israelite government was supposed to preserve that state of perfection which society everywhere attains and expresses in economic and other material transactions. The purpose of civil penalties was to restore the injured party to his prior condition, so far as this is possible, rather than merely to penalize the aggressor.” Justice was primarily restorative rather than punitive—at least in the vision of the Mishnah. ²   

In market economies (like ours), there is no such thing as “intrinsic value”; the value of any item is determined by what consumers will pay for it. In the society of the Mishnah, however, “true value means that a given object has an intrinsic worth which, in the course of a transaction, must be paid. Usury (the charging of interest) was treated as fraud, as the violation of true value. Usury means profit; any pretense that money increases or has become ‘more’ than what it was violates the conception of true value.” If I borrow an old hammer from my neighbor, I should not owe him an entire set of brand-new tools in return. According to Neusner, “Even when real estate was divided, it had to be done with full attention to the rights of all concerned, so that one party did not gain at the expense of another.”

Neusner frankly acknowledged what critics would surely leap to point out: “The economics of the Mishnah is not an economics at all. Rather, in the Mishnah’s system, economics is embedded in an encompassing structure to which economic considerations are subordinated. Economics can emerge as an autonomous and governing theory only when disembedded from politics and society. Economic institutions, such as the market, the wage system, a theory of private ownership, and the like, in no way could have served the system of the Mishnah because the system builders viewed nothing in its own terms but saw all things in the framework of the social system they proposed to construct.” ³    

The lesson here is not simply that Professor Morris Silver erred in criticizing Amos, Isaiah, Hosea, and other prophets of YHWH, all of whom were less interested in Israel’s Gross Domestic Product than in its practice of justice, mercy, and compassion. The lesson is that part of what ails the modern West is that we have allowed economics to be divorced from any larger social vision, utopian or otherwise; we have made profit an end unto itself rather than a means towards achieving a more perfect social order. There is no doubt that the all-but-unrestrained pursuit of profit has led to prosperity—but what is our affluence for? What is our economy for? If we’re so rich, why aren’t we happy?

Economics, wrote Jacob Neusner, is widely considered to be “the theory of rational action with regard to scarcity”. Fair enough, but perhaps we ought to consider what kinds of “scarcity” require our action. We can hardly claim to be suffering from a scarcity of “things”—possessions, objects, stuff. On the other hand, it is not difficult to see that there exists a dire scarcity of justice, mercy, compassion, neighborly love, and so on. To quote Richard Thompson: “Some of the people are poor in the purse, / they don’t have the cash at the ready; / and some of the people are crippled and lame, / they can’t seem to stand true and steady. / Some of the people are poor in the head, / like the simpleton fools that you see; / but most of the people are poor in the heart, / and it’s the worst kind of poor, the worst kind of poor you can be.”

An economics of money alone misses the mark; the scarcest resources of all are the very things money can’t buy.

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Jacob Neusner - Wikipedia

Jacob Neusner bibliography - Wikipedia

¹ The Mishnah is, in Neusner’s words, “the initial statement of the Judaism of the dual Torah”.  The older Torah was the written law given to Moses on Sinai; it was then augmented over the centuries by the oral laws and interpretations developed by Jewish rabbis and scholars.  Mishnah - Wikipedia

² This is neither the time nor the place to argue whether God’s treatment of sinful mankind, as recorded in Genesis, met the standards of the Mishnah. YHWH was the God of Israel; he was powerful in the extreme, but no one said he was perfect.

³ One should add, “according to the instructions they believed they had received from YHWH.”

Sunday Sermon: You Are the Light

You Are the Light (by Maria McKee)

You are the light in my dark world
You are the fire that will always burn
You are the light, you are the light
You are the light in my dark world

Oh how you shine in my time of darkness
Oh how you shine when everything seems hopeless
You know how to help me when I can’t stand on my own
Don’t let go now

You are the light in my dark world
You are the fire that will always burn
You are the light, you are the light
You are the light in my dark world

Oh how you shine in my time of indecision
Oh how you shine, gonna give this girl some vision
You know how to let go when I can’t stand on my own
Don’t let go now

You are the light in my dark world
You are the fire that will always burn
You are the light, you are the light
You are the light in my dark world

You know how to let go when I can’t stand on my own
Don’t let go now

You are the light in my dark world
You are the fire that will always burn
You are the light, you are the light
You are the light in my dark world

Lone Justice album version: You Are The Light - YouTube

Live Version: Maria McKee - St. Patrick's Cathedral TradFest 2017 - You Are The Light