The Little Red Blog

Wednesday with Pascal: A Marxism State of Mind

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat all but begged me to assign him the task of commenting on the latest demagogic rant from ex-President Dunning-Kruger. I agreed, but I can see now I should first have asked Pascal exactly what he planned to say.} 

At CPAC 2023, perpetually cranky former Toddler-in-Chief Donald Trump spoke these words:

I said it many times that we would never be a socialist country, I shouted it out loud and I was right, because that train has passed the station, long ago, of socialism; it never came close to stopping, frankly. We’re now in a Marxism state of mind, a communism state of mind, which is far worse. We’re a nation in decline; our enemies are desperate to stop us because they know that we are the only ones that can stop them. They know that.

We had a Republican party that was ruled by freaks, neocons, globalists, open border zealots, and fools, but we are never going back to the party of Paul Ryan, Karl Rove, and Jeb Bush. We have no choice. If we don’t do this, our country will be lost forever. People are tired of RINOs and globalists; they want to see ‘America First,’ that’s what they want, it’s not too complicated.

We’re not a free nation right now. We don’t have free press; we don’t have free anything. In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice.’ Today I would add, I am your warrior. I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution, I am your retribution—not gonna let this happen, not gonna let it happen. I will totally obliterate the Deep State, I will fire…[applause stops him mid-sentence]

If only he had added, “I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds!” this would have been a speech for the ages; as it stands, it’s a speech for ages approximately 5—8.

Surprisingly, a fitting response to President Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV can be found in the scriptures (the Book of Job) with only a slight revision. Rather than “Job laments that he was ever born,” it is now “America laments that Donald Trump was ever born”:

Let the day perish on which he was born,
and the night that said, ‘A man-child is conceived.’ ¹
Let that day become darkness;
may God not seek it from above,
nor may daylight shine on it.
Let darkness and deep shadow claim it;
let clouds settle on it;
let them terrify it with the blackness of day.
Let darkness seize that night;
let it not rejoice among the days of the year;
let it not enter among the number of the months.
Look, let that night become barren;
let no joyful song enter into it.
Let the stars of its dawn be dark;
let it hope for light but let there be none,
and let it not see the eyelids of dawn
because it did not shut the doors of his mother’s womb.

Why did he not die at birth? ²
Why did he not come forth from the womb and expire?
Why were there knees to receive him
and breasts that he could suck?
For now he should lie down, and we would be at peace;
He would be asleep; and we would be at rest.
Or why was he not hidden like a miscarriage,
like infants who did not see the light?

I am but a mere cat ³, but even I shudder to imagine how long it will take America to live down the ignominy of having elected such a buffoonish, petulant man to the highest office in the country—not to mention the further ignominy of having to explain how 75 million Americans voted to give him a second term in office. To avert further national disgrace, I propose that the Environmental Protection Agency declare former President Dunce Cap a pollutant and a public health hazard, and quarantine him immediately.

_________________________________________

¹ “Man-child” could also be translated as “big baby” or “overgrown infant”.

² Seriously—why? Why did the heavens not darken? Why did the angels not cry themselves a river? Why did the earth itself not swallow him up? Why did Satan’s triumphant laughter fail to awaken God from His long sleep and alert him to the fact that something had gone terribly wrong! Why did the patented “Antichrist Early Warning” system fail to function? 

³ Not really; I am, as has been clearly and frequently stated, an existential Russian blue cat. Besides which, meerkats aren’t even cats; they are mongooses, which I am not.

CPAC 2023

Education for the Eschaton

{Apropos of nothing, our quote for today is from Senator Rick Scott (R-FL): “Democrats want to destroy America.” Curses! How did he manage to decode our platform?}

I’ll make this quick: the time is short, the end is near, and we are doomed.

According to Molly Olmstead (at Slate), Christian publishers are currently churning out “survival guides, books about current events, and prayer manuals all oriented around a rapture, a second coming of Christ, or an otherwise cataclysmic event at the hands of God.” How does one account for “this spate of end-times books”? One consults an expert—in this case, “Tommy Ice, a retired theology professor and the executive director of the Pre-Trib Research Center.”

Professor Ice explains “the rising interest in end times”:

“The reason it’s happening is the totalitarianism in the United States. It’s because of the seemingly overnight decline of America, from our perspective. It’s a huge shift, the stealing of an election. When has that ever happened in the United States?”

For him, the “stolen presidential election”—along with, he believes, stolen elections in the two 2020 Senate races in Georgia—clarified the depths of the nation’s degeneracy. (All of the election fraud claims that Ice cited as signs of totalitarianism have been thoroughly debunked.) That, he said, was “lining up with what it is going to be like after the rapture of the church, where you have the Antichrist coming from Europe, who’s going to be the world ruler.”

Don’t say you weren’t warned.

The rapture, apocalypse, and end times are sweeping Christian books, with a Trump connection. (slate.com)

___________________________________________________

At the Acton Institute Powerblog, Auguste Meyrat reflects on a new book, Don’t Go to College, in which co-authors “Michael J. Robillard and Timothy J. Gordon not only cover the familiar problems plaguing colleges but also perceive something deeper corrupting an institution that was so fundamental to Western civilization. The real problem is more than the financial cost, the coddling, or even the abuse the writers themselves suffered—it’s the philosophy stupid.”

It seems that a specter is haunting American universities: the specter of “neo-Marxism,” which, alas, Meyrat doesn’t bother defining or explaining. Instead, he simply quotes Robillard and Gordon: ‘[Traditional education] is meant to advance actual knowledge, neo-Marxism is meant to advance propaganda, which is true to Marx’s goal of putting change (revolution) above understanding (wisdom).’ Whereas one philosophical system espouses the intellect and reason, the other system emphasizes feeling and action. It’s no mystery which one is the easier sell to young adults.”

Meyrat goes on to explain that “ideas have consequences, and the damage done by the capture of neo-Marxism cannot be underestimated.” [He means “overestimated,” of course, unless he means “should not be underestimated”.] “Neo-Marxism has fundamentally warped the whole goal of college. According to Robillard and Gordon, students who are now charged with ‘changing the world’ have taken this to mean ‘changing mankind,’ which explains the current rush to embrace transhumanism. Citing more than a few authorities on this topic, the writers explain:

‘Transhumanists believe that human beings are reducible to data points; technology can deliver secular utopia; tech gurus should lead society (and globalist technocrats manage it); and depopulation, anti-natalism, extreme life extension, vegetarianism/veganism, alternative sexual lifestyles, New Age spiritualism (but not Christianity), wokeism, and new urbanist, “smart-city” living are all unquestionably good things.’ 

To paraphrase Richard Nixon, we are all transhumanists now, data points existing in virtual reality—at least, that’s how Robillard, Gordon, and Meyrat see things. I, on the other hand, have never met a transhumanist, an anti-natalist, or anyone who believed in a technological utopia; perhaps I have led a sheltered existence.

Auguste Meyrat’s only complaint about Don’t Go to College is that the authors offer no useful solutions; all they advise is either to become an autodidact (easier said than done) or to go to college and troll the woke professors and the sheeple who follow them. As Meyrat sees it, we should not throw out the baby of higher learning with the bathwater of neo-Marxist transhumanism. He agrees that the present situation is untenable; “bad education and bad philosophy,” after all, “ultimately lead to an unfulfilling, impotent kind of life. It’s no surprise that our society has decayed politically and culturally; this is the inevitable result of its having rejected the West’s, and Western education’s, founding principles.” Still, Meyrat does not want to bury the universities, only the woke faculty and the postmodern curricula. “It’s critical,” he concludes, “that we either restore the university from the ground up or design a plausible alternative, one that’s unafraid to recover the great books of the past and that can assist and inspire us in our lifelong pursuit of wisdom.”

As someone who dropped out of college as soon as the bursar's office cashed the tuition check from my parents, I am sympathetic to the "don't go to college" movement. However, there ought to be better reasons to quit school than woke faculty and transhumanist indoctrination. How about this: don't go to college because the eschaton is about to arrive, and you will either be Raptured into the clouds with Jesus or caught up in the battle against Antichrist here on earth?  

Does College Get in the Way of Education? – Acton Institute PowerBlog

       Either the end times have arrived, or Spring Break has gotten out of hand...

We Have Met the Enemy, and It Is Teachers and Democracy

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

The President of Hillsdale College and the Governor of Tennessee walk into a private reception being held in their honor. Larry Arnn looks at Bill Lee and says,

“Teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country, and they are taught that they are going to go and do something to those kids. My wife is English, and she’s a gardener, and she doesn’t talk about what she is going to do to these plants. She talks about what they need, because if you give them what they need, they will grow. It’s not a manufacturing operation.”

Funny stuff, amirite? Kudos to the alert fan who recorded the hilarious exchange!

Now the usual snowflakes suspects (e.g., Nashville’s News Channel 5) are up in arms about Larry Arnn and his impolitic remarks, even though Joy Pullmann, writing at The Federalist, insists that “Teachers and research agree: educations schools are garbage.” Ms. Pullman is not just talking out of her, um, well, she knows what she’s talking about:

In 2006, 62 percent of teachers told researchers their training didn’t prepare them well for their jobs. In general, education colleges not only do not prepare teachers to succeed in the classroom; the teachers have been so thoroughly corrupted by cultural Marxism that what they learn in the typical preparation program actually degrades their skills. 

These are well-reinforced, longstanding empirical findings bolstered by many forms of evidence. As I wrote 10 years ago, “Teachers tend to have below-average SAT, ACT, LSAT, and GRE scores, and statistics show their college coursework is among the least challenging available. Education majors must take more remedial college coursework than their counterparts in humanities and social sciences. Traditional teacher preparation programs emphasize education and social theories, which research has demonstrated are ineffective teaching methods.”

No wonder Johnny and Janey can’t read! No wonder our kids is not learning! No wonder Hillsdale’s President Larry Arnn is lobbying Governor Lee to use (for free!) Hillsdale’s patented (and free!) “high-quality curricula” in Tennessee public schools. What part of “high-quality curricula” does Nashville’s News Channel 5 not understand?

Joy Pullmann concludes her report with the thoughtful, reasoned rhetoric for which The Federalist is famous: “Very powerful interests,” Pullman writes, “want to keep truth away from Americans, thereby keeping Tennessee’s children and teachers at their mental and institutional mercy. Liars like these can’t be trusted to watch your laptop when you go to the bathroom, not to mention to educate your child. Their hold on power must be broken.”

Such sophisticated argumentation is irresistible, especially coming from a woman who calls herself a “grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs,” a distinction Ms. Pullmann modestly chooses not to mention in her article.

Hillsdale President Tells Truth About Teacher Training, Media Goes Nuts (thefederalist.com)

<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< 

At In These Times, Hamilton Nolan ¹ explains that “when the world is burning,” pragmatism, caution, and prudence are for losers. “On a normal day,” writes Nolan, “you wouldn’t dive out of a fifth-floor window into the river below — but if your building was on fire, that would become the most reasonable choice.  Diving from that window into the river below sure seems terrifying, but not as terrifying as staying put and burning to death.” 

Scolding the political moderates, centrists, and “realists” among us, Nolan continues, “The failure to understand that solutions must match the scale and severity of our problems leaves us, inevitably, with problems that never get solved. Problems that never get solved, in these cases, translate to the mass immiseration of millions of people for generation after generation.”

Is that what you want, America? I should hope not, especially when the solution is so obvious: The obvious solution is to change the structures that are constricting our ability to build a functioning democracy. Obviously! Yet ​“structural reform” is perceived by the majority of people in power as a step too far. We can’t even get the filibuster out of the way with a Democratic Congress. Joe Biden has already proclaimed that he doesn’t favor expanding the Supreme Court. Despite the elections of both Bush and Trump, who lost the popular vote, there has not been any sustained push to scrap the Electoral College. And ​‘abolish the Senate’ is not even discussed enough to enter the pantheon of fringe positions. Recognition of the fact that our entire system was designed by humans and can be changed by humans and, furthermore, must be changed by humans remains mystifyingly absent from mainstream discourse. ² We are like the drivers of a car accelerating towards a brick wall, unwilling to take our foot off the gas pedal and hit the brakes, because we don’t want to disturb the passengers in the back seat.    

What a perfect description of our plight: trapped in a burning building, we are driving headlong towards a brick wall, trying not to disturb our passengers as we prepare to dive out the fifth-floor window into the river below.

Michael Anton himself (“The Flight 93 Election”) could not have said it better, or even Admiral David Farragut: Damn the backseat passengers, ditch the cumbersome ballast of democracy, and full speed ahead!  

____________________________

¹ Full disclosure: Hamilton Nolan describes the American founding thusly: “Nearly a quarter of a millennium ago, a small group of wealthy white men in a fledgling colonial nation wrote a constitution that seemed, to them, the best they could do, with their accumulated wisdom at the time, and in light of all of the necessary political compromises.” Nolan is clearly an unpatriotic fellow and not to be trusted.

² Re “our entire system was designed by humans”: please see footnote above for Nolan’s estimate of the humans who did the designing.

Radical Is Now Rational - In These Times

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

Sunday Sermon: Apocalypse Eventually

{“Apocalypse” means “unveiling”. In religious terms, it refers to the unveiling of cosmic mysteries. In Christian tradition, apocalypse was associated with the eschaton (the end of this world) and with the Parousia (the return of Jesus). “Apocalyptic,” according to J. Christiaan Beker, “denotes an end-time occurrence that is both cosmic-universal and definitive.” Apocalypse was, for the first Christians, a consummation devoutly to be wished, and, as Paul repeatedly reminded everyone, it was coming soon.}

“For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.” (Paul, 1 Thessalonians)

J. Christiaan Beker (from Paul’s Apocalyptic Gospel):

For a long time now there has been a vigorous rejection of the apocalyptic mode of thought in the New Testament. Christians and non-Christians alike feel alienated from a world view that seems primitive and obsolete, that indulges in speculations about the end of the world, and that is preoccupied with a literalistic understanding of fanciful images and bizarre visions.

Moreover, the predictions of apocalyptic prophets about the end of the world have regularly turned out to be false, evidenced by the stubborn continuation of history. How can anyone today proclaim an apocalyptic message and hope to be taken seriously? What Christian would want to equate the message of the gospel with an obsolete Jewish world view and contaminate it with a kind of hope that has been refuted by the very process of human history? The retention of an imminent hope in the apocalyptic manifestation of the kingdom of God surely falls under Albert Schweitzer’s moving words about Jesus:

“In the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man, he lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. The wheel refuses to turn, and he throws himself on it. Then it does turn; and crushes him. Instead of bringing in the eschatological conditions, he has destroyed them. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of this one immeasurably great man, who was strong enough to think of himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to his purpose, is hanging upon it still.” ¹   

Today, however, a new interest in the apocalyptic message of the New Testament is widespread. There is a growing uneasiness with the reduction of New Testament eschatology to existentialist categories; there is also a growing awareness that a doctrine of unlimited progress for our culture has turned out to be an illusion. Technology and progress seem no longer to go hand in hand; to many of us, technology no longer represents progress but a threat to life itself.

Our manner of treating the apocalyptic of the New Testament in purely aesthetic terms or as an ornamental husk that adds poetic beauty rather than theological substance to our convictions is both morally dishonest and intellectually shallow.

________________

Johan Christiaan Beker (1924-1999) was born in the Netherlands. He was imprisoned by German occupation forces during World War II. After the war, he emigrated to the United States; he was Professor of New Testament Theology for thirty years at Princeton Theological Seminary.

¹ I have read this quote from Schweitzer I don’t know how many times, and it remains the most breathtakingly powerful passage I have ever read about Jesus.

17 Phillip Medhurst Apocalypse 49 War in heaven. Revelation cap 12 vv 7-12. Perelle

Wednesday with Pascal: At the End of Our Tether

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat with Ukrainian sympathies recently began reading Colin Wilson’s classic The Outsider. Early in the book, Wilson quotes extensively H.G. Wells’ “Mind at the End of Its Tether”; those quotes sent Pascal scurrying to that text to examine it for himself.}

“What I mean is that the time is short. This world in its present form is passing away.” (Paul, 1 Corinthians)

A utopian socialist and a technological optimist for most of his life, H.G. Wells, by 1945, was at the end of his tether, exhausted by a half-century of wars, revolutions, genocides, holocausts, and nuclear destruction. “Mind at the End of Its Tether” made clear that Wells no longer possessed either the strength or the inclination to keep a stiff upper lip. He had given up on everything; “There has been a fundamental change in the conditions under which life, not only human life but all self-conscious existence, has been going on since its beginning,” he pronounced. “This world is at the end of its tether. The end of everything that we call life is close at hand and cannot be evaded.”

In a passage that Colin Wilson would cite in The Outsider, Wells claimed that “A frightful queerness has come into life. Even quite unobservant people now are betraying, by fits and starts, a certain wonder, a shrinking and fugitive sense that something is happening so that life will never be quite the same again.” Concealed beneath the smoke from Nazi death camps and the mushroom clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Age of Alienation had arrived.

Wells viewed life as a Darwinian biological process that, once begun, inexorably persisted, leading to the struggle for scarce resources that marked not just human history but the history of every living organism:

“Life begins as an urge to exist so powerful that every form it takes tends to increase in size and numbers and outgrow its supply of food energy. Groups or aggregates or individuals increase not only in numbers but in size. There is an internecine struggle for existence. The bigger aggregations or individuals eliminate the smaller and consume more and more. Resources run short, and new forms, capable of utilizing material which the more primitive were not equipped to assimilate, arise.”

In Wells’ modified Malthusian worldview, life was competitive, precarious, and unforgiving, with even the most endangered species clinging stubbornly to life:

“For the whole three thousand million years of organic evolution, we have the same spectacle of beings overrunning their means of subsistence and thrusting their fellows out of the normal way of life into strange habitats they would never have tolerated but for that urge to live, anyhow and at any price, rather than die. For long periods, a sort of balance of life between various species has existed, and their needless mutations have been eliminated. Hypertrophy, however, has led not only to an excess of growth over nutriment but also to a loss of adaptability through the relative importance of bigness over variation. The more they dominated, the more they kept on being the same thing.”

Once organisms become too big to fail in their given evolutionary niche, they cease to evolve. Stagnation is vulnerability; eventually, some novelty of nature comes along to replace those once dominant organisms. Alternatively, nature alters the environment, creating conditions in which the former lords of the habitats can no longer survive. Nothing lasts forever except the endless, repetitious cycles of living and dying, breeding and fighting. The more the world changed, the more it remained the same.

In the 20^th century, according to Wells, the Cosmic Order had finally grown tired of the whole pointless process. Having somehow arranged for the existence of life on this planet, the Order was beginning to “turn against us, to set its face against us.” Wells was uncertain how to address the Cosmic Order or to explain its volte face: “Power, the ‘Cosmic Process,’ the ‘Beyond,’ the ‘Unknown,’ the ‘Unknowable,’ all carry unsound implications. The ‘Antagonism’ by itself overstresses the idea of positive enmity. But if we fall back on the structure of Greek tragic drama and think of life as the ‘Protagonist’ (trailing with it the presence of an indifferent chorus), we get something to meet our need: ‘the Antagonist’ expresses the unknown implacable which has endured life for so long and has now turned against it to wipe it out.”

In groping for the right word, Wells could have saved himself a good bit of trouble by simply borrowing the Biblical term ‘the Adversary,’ but he likely did not want to drag either Satan or YHWH into his scenario. Still, Wells’ thinking was suggestive of a metaphysical drama. In some interpretations of scripture, Satan had been allowed (by God) to rule over the earth until the eschaton; perhaps, in the light of the first half of the twentieth century, Satan felt his work here was effectively done and that it was time to draw the curtain on the whole terrestrial tragedy. If Satan’s role was to be both “tempter” and “accuser” of mankind, what more proof of human culpability could he submit to YHWH’s divine court?

Absent such a dramatic, albeit fanciful, explanation of our plight, Wells had nothing better to offer than a tired, indifferent cosmic dualism. The Antagonist wasn’t angry with us, or even displeased; it was just, well, bored. Wells did not imagine a war between Good and Evil; rather, he sensed a kind of cosmic ennui, as if the life force simply had lost interest and had given the universe over to entropy. The batteries of the cosmos had run out; like T.S. Eliot, Wells foresaw things ending not with a bang but with a whimper.  

Having declared the end to be at hand, Wells then posed the obvious question: what had been the point in the first place? Had life, human and otherwise, meant anything or accomplished anything? “From time immemorial,” Wells reflected, “introspective minds have conceived a disgust for the stresses, vexations, and petty indignities of life, from which they have taken refuge in mystical withdrawal. It is a peculiar human element: the recurrent refusal to be satisfied with the real world. The question “Is this all there is?” has troubled countless unsatisfied minds throughout the ages; and now, at the end of our tether, here it is, still baffling but persistent.”

As of 1945, H.G. Wells had apparently arrived at his answer:

“The world of our everyday reality is no more than a more or less entertaining or distressing story thrown upon a cinema screen. The story holds together; it moves us greatly; yet some of us feel it is faked. The vast majority of the viewers accept all the conventions of the story, and live and suffer and rejoice and die in it and with it. But the skeptical watcher says, ‘This is delusion. There must be something beyond this.’ But is there? Events vanish into an impenetrable mystery, into a voiceless limitless darkness, against which our dissatisfied minds may struggle, but only until the struggle is finally overcome. Our world of self-delusion will perish along with its evasions and fatuities. Mind near exhaustion will make its final futile movements towards some way out or round or through the impasse.”

And a closing couplet: “This is the utmost now that mind can do. There is no way out or round or through.”

H.G. Wells died in 1946. It is almost eighty years now since he declared the imminent end of all our hopes and even of life itself. One could say that the passage of time makes Wells a failed prophet, or even a false prophet; to be fair, though, it has been two thousand years since Jesus and Paul made their equally apocalyptic and equally erroneous predictions. Perhaps we should cut Wells a bit of slack; perhaps we should even consider—as the Anthropocene and the Sixth Great Extinction continue apace, the ice sheets melt, the forests burn, and the ocean levels rise—his gloomy intuitions were not entirely unfounded.     

____________________

H. G. Wells - Wikipedia

(3) Tackhead - Mind At The End Of The Tether - YouTube

Praying for the End of the World

{Long-winded preface: yesterday, I chanced upon Blake Smith’s review of Jerry Muller’s upcoming book, The Professor of the Apocalypse, a biography of the 20^th-century scholar Jacob Taubes (who died in 1987). Taubes was a friend—or at least an acquaintance—of Carl Schmitt, who I mentioned in my recent post “The Meaning of Politics”. Taubes shared Schmitt’s antipathy towards modern liberalism (though not Schmitt’s anti-Semitism or his Nazi background); his final book, The Political Theology of Paul, was written, according to Blake Smith, in response to a discussion with Schmitt about Paul’s role in the formation of Christian anti-Judaism.}

Though they disagreed on much, Jacob Taubes and Carl Schmitt had this much in common: they believed liberals failed to understand what was at stake in politics. Taubes viewed politics as messianic and eschatological, whereas Schmitt leaned more towards mythic “blood and soil,” but both considered liberals and liberal politics to be the enemy. Blake Smith, writing at Tablet, explains:

“Schmitt saw more clearly than other thinkers that politics turned on hatreds, on the identification of friends and foes. In his pre-war writings, Schmitt had argued that liberal regimes, like the Weimar Republic, then tottering under assaults from both extremes of the political spectrum, are premised on the idea that all conflicts can be resolved through rational discussion. Their leaders imagine that politics is merely a kind of debate club in which ideas are exchanged, secured by a framework of universal rights that applies neutrally to all. They are unable to see that some groups cannot be accommodated within this framework, and, demanding more than the mere right to be heard, pose a mortal threat to the regime. Politics, in essence, was about defending the “homogeneity” of the political community and eradicating its internal enemies.” ¹

In his essay, Smith emphasizes the centrality of “Messiah” as a political issue for Taubes: “In a series of lectures to an audience of Protestant scholars in Heidelberg, Germany a few weeks before his death on March 21, 1987, Taubes argued that the most important political question is the question of Messiah. The pattern of our political and religious life together, and the meaning of our individual lives, depend on its answer. The question is not who, among the many candidates put forward by various communities of believers, he is—nor whether he has already come, is still alive, is yet to appear, etc. These questions will appear important only if we have already answered the question of whether, in the first place, we want Messiah. Against such a desire stands all our yearning, often unspoken but constant and strong, for things to remain the same, our complicity with the powers of the present world.”

The basic problem with liberalism, for Taubes, was that it represented a rejection of Messiah: which is to say, liberals do not yearn for an apocalypse, for the eschaton, or for the beginning of a new age. ² Liberals are, one might say, the political equivalent of Anglicans; they want politics done decently and in good order (and kept out of the street, lest it frighten the horses). ³ Writing about Paul, Jacob Taubes sought “an existential confrontation with the question of Messiah—and of his enemies. The latter, Taubes argued, are those who seek to ‘hold back’ the end of the present world, who believe that it can get along for itself without a ‘living God’ who appears unpredictably into history and into our lives. He calls these people, with contempt, ‘liberals.’ Paul, he argued, was ‘more Jewish than all the liberal or reformed rabbis’ who prayed only half-heartedly for Messiah.”

As Blake Smith puts it, “Taubes’ lectures represent one of the most powerful critiques of liberalism, understood not only as a political philosophy, but as a spiritual disposition, or rather a spiritual desiccation, by which liberals neutralize the radical promises of faith. His final lectures, published as The Political Theology of Paul, are a challenge both to those of us who, from whatever vantage, claim to desire Messiah, and those—often the same people—who seek to preserve political liberalism in an increasingly illiberal world.”

Eschatological theology, which invites and welcomes the chaos, tumult, and sufferings of the last days, is at odds with a quotidian politics conceived as “the art of the possible” and, to that extent, as a force for civil order. Smith claims that “Christians, in principle, ought to be eager for the release of the Antichrist, insofar as that event hastens the return of the Messiah.” ⁴ It was on this issue, though, that Taubes and Schmitt parted ways: “Schmitt saw the Antichrist not so much as the terrifying but necessary prelude for the messianic era, but as a principle of disorder, of which Marxism was the preeminent modern instrument. Advocating “counter-revolution,” Schmitt argued that preserving the world meant identifying the ‘katechon’ [the preserver of order] of our times and supporting its struggle against evil.” Taubes would have none of it. Efforts to secure the political and social order were, in effect if not in intent, efforts to keep God out of history. Taubes derisively accused Christians like Schmitt of “praying for the conservation of the state, because if the state is not secured, God forbid, then chaos begins, or, what’s still worse, the Kingdom of God!”

Blake Smith sides with Taubes’ longing for the Kingdom:

Taubes took from Schmitt the lesson that politics, and religion, are founded on our choice for or against God’s coming kingdom. Either we seek to preserve the existing order of things, or we insist that the promises of a better world made to us by the Scriptures are not mere metaphors or visions, but realities to which we must continue to aspire. There is an unavoidable conflict raging, not so much between our regime and its enemies, or between counter-revolution and revolution, but between those who fear Messiah’s coming and those who welcome it. Liberalism, for Taubes, is a misguided attempt to refuse that choice, to resist Schmitt’s dangerous truth that we cannot avoid making the distinction between friends and enemies—and that, more radically, we must declare ourselves friends or enemies of Messiah.

And so, we have a remarkable transvaluation of political values: liberals seek to preserve political (and earthly) order, while religious conservatives fervently pray for disorder and upheaval as a prelude to the eschaton. A messianic Christian (or messianic Jew) must pray without ceasing, “Thy kingdom come!” The rest of us, perhaps, can just add the Augustinian codicil, “But not yet.”

_________________

The Professor of Apocalypse - Tablet Magazine

Jerry Muller’s The Professor of Apocalypse is scheduled to be released in May. In the meantime, for those interested in the subject, Jacob Taubes’ The Political Theology of Paul can be found online, for free, at the Internet Archive.

¹ And yet the same overly accommodating liberals are also accused today of promoting “cancel culture” and of foisting an illiberal “political correctness” onto the body politic: damned if you or if you don’t. I believe Phil Ochs’ classic satire should be retitled, “Hate Me, I’m a Liberal”.

² This view contradicts that of another iconic anti-liberal, Eric Voegelin, who charged liberals with being modern-day Gnostics seeking to “immanentize the eschaton”.      

³ The phrase “decently and in good order” originates in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. Its applicability to the Anglican Church has been widely noted, e.g., Henry Jasma’s observation that “the English Restoration bishops pushed for greater precision over diversity within the dioceses of the Church of England so that all things may be done decently and in good order, at least as they saw it.” 

⁴ If Antichrist is here, Christ can’t be far behind; ergo, unleash the Kraken!

 

I would have gotten here sooner, but I misplaced my trumpet.

 

 

Friday Miscellany

Does the First Amendment allow you to shout “FIRE” on a crowded university campus?

The reason I ask is that the “Foundation for Individual Rights in Education” (FIRE) has released a summary of its own investigation into reported violations of “constitutionally protected free speech” by college professors. The summary (link below) is headed “REPORT: 3 in 4 campaigns targeting faculty expression result in punishment”; it then asserts that “74% of smear campaigns result in an investigation or another punishment,” thus concluding that such campaigns have “an alarming 74% success rate”.  

“Smear campaigns” is, of course, an entirely unfair and unwarranted categorization which leads one to suspect FIRE’s objectivity. That aside, note that while the heading refers to “punishment,” the data itself refers to “an investigation or another punishment”. Is it reasonable to classify an investigation as a “punishment”? Might some supposed investigations have been merely cursory or pro forma and not punitive in the least? Should allegations of “hate speech,” bias, or classroom misconduct not be investigated?

Moreover, does the “alarming success rate” indicate widespread violation of professors’ rights or, to the contrary, egregious violations by said professors of academic standards? The FIRE summary, at least, provides no detail to help us judge the question. It does, however, specify the percentage of professors dismissed for their alleged misconduct: “A quarter of such attacks result in scholars losing their job.” (“Attacks” is another pejorative characterization—why is a complaint necessarily an “attack”?)

We can conclude, then, as follows: of the speech-related complaints that FIRE examined, 26% went nowhere (no investigation or disciplinary action); 25% led to dismissal of the professor; and 49% were investigated with some lesser but unspecified consequence (e.g., a slap on the wrist, a reprimand in one’s faculty file, or a mandatory stint in a Black Lives Matter re-education camp). We might also note in passing that the report found that, while roughly 2/3 of complaints came from sources with views to the ideological Left of an accused academic, 1/3 came from sources to the accused’s ideological Right. Given the predominantly left-wing tilt on campus, these numbers make intuitive sense.

Regarding “free speech” on campus, I suggest we keep in mind Stanley Fish’s dictum, “There is no such thing as free speech, and it’s a good thing, too.” Speech limits (like limits on other conduct) are always being set, always being questioned, always being challenged, and always being reconsidered and/or revised. The boundaries of academic discourse are no more fixed than the boundaries of, say, network television, Hollywood films, or the use of social media by incumbent Presidents.

REPORT: 3 in 4 campaigns targeting faculty expression result in punishment (thefire.org)  via RealClearInvestigations.com    

Do not be misled by the title of Bruce Abramson’s “The Conservative Temperament Is Dooming America”; the article is a call to arms against “the stupidity, cruelty, and moral bankruptcy of radical leftist wokeism”. Abramson’s complaint about “the conservative temperament” is that it is not, by nature, sufficiently aggressive or militant; instead, it empowers “respectable, cautious, incrementalists like Mitch McConnell, John Roberts, and Kevin McCarthy—fine men blessed with none of the skills necessary to lead a counterrevolution.”  

Let us briefly pause to consider that characterization of those men. "Respectable" may be in the eye of the beholder, but "cautious" and "incrementalist" have actual meanings that do not seem consistent with the public records of the aforementioned individuals. In other words, WTF?

Moving on: a counterrevolution is precisely what our woke age calls for, says Abramson. “If the right wants to fight, it’s going to have to jettison its collective conservative temperament and embrace personalities capable of leading a restorationist movement.”

The term “restorationist” is well chosen (even if my spell-check program rejects it). Abramson and his comrades on the Right want their country back; they want the old order restored. They seem surprisingly inarticulate about the exact nature of that old order, but I can offer a hint: it rhymes with “right” and with “fight” and it feels comfortably at home on Tucker Carlson’s show every night.

The Conservative Temperament Is Dooming America | RealClearPolitics

Finally: I leave the interpretation of the following story to individual readers. At Massive Science, Briley Lewis states, matter-of-factly and without a trace of alarm, “Our Sun is middle-aged, with about five billion years left in its lifespan. However, it’s expected to go through some changes as it gets older, as we all do — and these changes will affect our planet. New research published in Nature Geoscience shows that Earth’s oxygen will only stick around for another billion years.”

Oh? Ought we to be concerned? Ms. Lewis does not editorialize; she simply explains the science. “One of the Sun’s age-related changes is getting brighter as it gets older. When a star runs out of hydrogen fuel in its core, the core has to get hotter in order to fuse the next element, helium. As the core gets hotter, the outer layers expand, and the star gets brighter. This extra energy hitting Earth will eventually cause our planet to warm up and slowly lose its oceans and its oxygen.” Lewis draws the obvious conclusion: “Planets like Earth only have oxygen for a fraction of their lifetimes. When we try to find habitable worlds, this will be important to keep in mind.”

That is American optimism and the American can-do spirit at its best! Go ahead and use up the planet; it’s going to run out of oxygen eventually anyway, and we can always find another habitable world somewhere…

Earth's oxygen is projected to run out in a billion years (massivesci.com)

On "Morality" and "Apocalypse Porn"

{Each of today's brief readings is provocative in its own way; 'Caveat lector,' as always.}

Forget morality, says a professor at the University of Toronto. Moral philosophy is bogus, and Professor Ronnie de Sousa should know, having taught classes in moral philosophy over the years. Writing at Aeon, he informs us that the entire enterprise of “morality” is a sham:

Morality is a shadow of religion, serving to comfort those who no longer accept divine guidance but still hope for an ‘objective’ source of certainty about right and wrong. Moralists claim to discern the existence of commands as inescapable as those of an omniscient and omnipotent God. Those commands, moral philosophers teach, deserve to prevail over all other reasons to act – always, everywhere, and for all time.

To which reasoning Professor de Sousa replies, “Not so fast”. He suggests, rather than allowing ourselves to be bullied by moralists (of whatever sort), “When making choices, we should consider our reasons without asking what is ‘morally right’.” This blatantly counterintuitive proposal need not open the door to license or to moral anarchy; we can still act rationally even if we forego cloaking our reasons under the guise of “moral imperatives”. De Sousa continues:

As the philosopher Joel Marks has argued before me, to renounce morality is to wake up to the fact that in every choice we are governed by desires. Some desires are for something we just want for itself; others are for ways or means of satisfying those. All constitute or are grounded in reasons to act. Those reasons can be almost exactly those that move a moralist. I have perfectly good reasons for my desire not to cause harm, not to act unfairly, or to be kind. These reasons derive both from my first-order reasons and from my reflection on them. They matter not because of morality, but because I care.

Since God is dead, it makes perfect sense to bury alongside him the kind of “totalizing morality” he represented, along with the elaborate system of carrots and sticks, some in this world and some in the next, that sustained that system for millennia. That, at least, is Professor de Sousa’s modest proposal; make of it what you will.

Five reasons why moral philosophy is distracting and harmful | Aeon Essays

At Spiked, Brendan O’Neill unloads on purveyors of what he calls “Apocalypse porn”: those who provide us images of raging wildfires and disastrous floods, accompanied by doomsday warnings about climate change. As O’Neill explains:

Like all scolds, the eco-apocalypstas seem to take pleasure in telling the rest of us that we’re doomed, that the planet will be consumed by heat death if we don’t alter our habits. ‘With raging wildfires, floods and pandemics, it seems like End Times – and it’s our own damned fault’, says a writer for the Hill. ‘Immediate repentance’ is required, says the Guardian, sticking with the frankly mad religious view of floods and fires as violent rebukes for humankind’s eco-sins. And of course, the ‘immediate repentance’ that is required is not saying the rosary a couple of times – it’s ‘immediate and deep emissions cuts’. What about the people of China, India and Brazil who still haven’t achieved our standard of living and who must emit a great deal more carbon in order to do so, I hear you ask? Don’t be silly. They don’t matter. The world’s on fire.”

O’Neill goes on to decry “the sheer opportunism, the speed with which every natural calamity – regardless of whether it can actually be linked to climate change – is politicized and exploited. Every fire and flood is turned into a horror film that the West’s bored middle classes then use to promote their drab green agenda.”

Politicized? O’Neill seems to be of two minds on that matter, dismissing the “drab green agenda” as a politicization of natural disasters while himself claiming that the problems we face are not about climate change but about political malfeasance:

“If the Greek fires are down to the hubristic excesses of modern man, then we don’t need to talk about EU austerity and how it impacted on the Greek public sector, including its capacity to fight fires. It’s not Brussels’ fault – it’s your fault for driving to Sainsbury’s in a diesel car twice a week. Likewise, Erdogan’s failure to prepare for the wildfires in Turkey gets buried by the global media’s obsessive belief that every fire is a warning from Gaia. And the fact that the floods in Europe seem to have been exacerbated by poor planning is just casually pushed aside, buried under the guff about Poseidon’s wrath and End Times. No wonder German ministers are happy to talk up the eco-apocalypse – it takes attention away from their own failures of vision and infrastructure.”

Are not those failures of planning and preparation themselves the result of governments not taking seriously the warnings about climate change and its consequences? O’Neill does not say, perhaps because he knows the answer. It is climate activists who have begged national and global leaders to act, both to mitigate the greenhouse warming and to invest in resources and infrastructure to deal with what we know is coming. If Greek, Turkish, German, and American leaders have not responded with an adequate sense of urgency, perhaps it is because people like Brendan O’Neill keep downplaying, and even mocking, environmental concerns.

Finally, O’Neill plays the “everything is actually getting better” card: “As Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, ‘Ever fewer people die from climate-related catastrophes.’ Even as the human population has quadrupled over the past century, deaths from climate disasters ‘have dropped 20-fold’. The death risk from natural calamities or extreme weather has fallen 99 per cent since the 1920s.” To which I can only offer in rebuttal this quote from Mark Twain: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Just because we now have more and better lifeboats does not mean we should dismiss the impending deluge; catastrophism may not help, but neither will complacency.

Apocalypse porn - spiked (spiked-online.com)

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy...

{Note: it is only 7 a.m. here in the Mountain West, and I have already shared, on Facebook, articles about new COVID-related social restrictions in Montana, about right-wing defiance of such restrictions (conservatives are the new Martin Luther King, who died so you would not have to follow public health guidelines during a pandemic--freedom!), about the War on Thanksgiving ("Grandma, would you like some extra COVID with your turkey?"), and about Trump's attempt, on his way out the door, to make life harder for people with disabilities. I thought all the insanity was supposed to end after Election Day; in the immortal words of Bob Dylan, "Oh my god, am I here all alone?"}  

In an opinion piece for NBC News, Michael Conway, former Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, says that we should all want incoming President Joseph Biden to issue a blanket pardon to outgoing President Donald Trump, because reasons.

I cannot even…

Mr. Conway’s distinguished resume includes work for the Democratic National Committee; he has been a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. I am sure his heart is in the right place when he suggests that we accept, or even request, a pre-emptive pardon for the single most corrupt individual ever elected to the presidency (and I am including Richard Nixon and Warren G. Harding).

If there is ever to be a time when we test the notion that, in our system, no one is above the law, this is it. I do not expect President Biden to make the legal pursuit of Donald Trump a priority, but neither do I expect him to get in the way of such pursuit, much less to issue a pardon.

Donald Trump belongs in jail.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/why-biden-should-pardon-trump-we-democrats-should-want-him-ncna1247986

At Law & Liberty, George Weigel worries about the future of our democracy, and who can blame him?

Weigel revisits the work of the late Fr. John Courtney Murray, author of We Hold These Truths (published in 1960) and widely regarded (and widely criticized) as having been a leader in attempts to reconcile traditional Catholicism with America’s liberal democracy. Weigel wishes to establish “Murray’s continuing salience as a clear-minded thinker about American democracy and its discontents.” He writes:

“As those discontents have become ever sharper, to the point where even non-“doomists” must wonder how the American democratic experiment in ordered liberty will renew and revitalize itself, Murray’s warnings from more than a half-century ago, and his analysis of the roots of a possible crack-up of American political culture, strike me as remarkably prescient and well worth pondering today.”

Let us ponder together, then. Weigel claims that “The most striking, even ominous, sentences in We Hold These Truths follow immediately after Murray has analyzed the ‘dissolution’ of the original ‘American consensus,’ or public moral culture, under several malign influences: the impact of an Ockhamite theory of freedom-as-willfulness mediated through Benthamite utilitarianism and Jamesian pragmatism; the scientific revolution and the rise of empiricism; and the theological disarray of mainline American Protestantism.” ¹

For what it’s worth, and because I am currently knee-deep in the subject, I feel I should note that Russian neo-idealists at the turn of the 20^th century were also unhappy with (among other things) empiricism, utilitarianism, scientism, pragmatism, positivism, Ockhamite nominalism, and Reformation-derived individualism.  In 1902, they elaborated on their complaints in a collection of essays, Problems of Idealism. Their unhappiness, alas, would only increase in the decades that followed--not that I am suggesting our fate will resemble theirs.

In any case, after a bit more preliminary throat-clearing, Weigel reveals Murray’s prophetic sentences:

That decay in the public moral culture, with its inevitable consequences in political culture and politics itself, was rather far advanced, Murray cautioned. Then came the voice of Murray-the-prophet, who loved what was best in the American experiment but feared that its foundations were crumbling, with potentially grave public results: “Perhaps the dissolution, long since begun, may one day be consummated. Perhaps one day the noble, many-storeyed mansion of democracy will be dismantled, leveled to the dimensions of a flat majoritarianism, which is no mansion but a barn, perhaps even a tool shed in which the weapons of tyranny may be forged.”

If I read the above passage correctly, George Weigel is saying that Americans in the year 2020 are living in a barn, or, worse, in a tool shed (which houses a forge). I know that some sections of this great nation are in need of upkeep, and I realize our infrastructure has seen better days—but a barn? A tool shed?

Weigel’s primary concern is that we have lost the moral fiber needed to sustain the tensile strength needed to sustain our form of government: “If the moral and intellectual foundations that make self-governance for the common good possible were to collapse; if the “truths” on which the American democratic experiment relied for its tensile strength were no longer held,” he writes, then we are, in a word, doomed. ³

When it comes to American democracy, I repeat what Mahatma Gandhi said when asked his opinion of Western civilization: “I think it would be a good idea.” Some cynics contend that our sainted Founders did everything they could to guard against the democratic principle, constructing a Rube Goldberg government of checks, balances, federalism, legislative gridlock, and the Electoral College, all of which were designed to ward off the horrifying possibility that the American people might someday attempt to govern themselves.

We even fought a bloody civil war to decide whether the propositions in the Declaration of Independence—"All Men are created Equal” and so forth—were anything more than rhetorical flourishes; after which, we set those same propositions aside—perhaps back in the barn or the shed—so they would not become dull from overuse.

It is indisputably true that a self-governing nation requires citizens who are informed, attentive, and self-governing themselves—morally speaking, that is. It is also true that We the People have always fallen short on both knowledge and virtue, possibly because we are too busy living our own lives to invest much time and energy to governing the lives of our neighbors. That, alas, is one of the many reasons why democracy remains the worst possible form of government, except for all the other forms that have been tried. ⁴

Now, if you will excuse me, I must go out to the tool shed to forge some additional weapons of tyranny. Perhaps I will begin by issuing some public health mandates and non-binding guidelines...

_________________

https://lawliberty.org/forum/recovering-the-moral-basis-of-democracy/

¹ The phrase “Ockham to Bentham to James” was immortalized in 1910 as “the saddest of possible words” by Franklin Pierce Adams. ²

² Upon further review, I seem to have confused “Ockham to Bentham to James” with “Tinker to Evers to Chance”; I therefore retract my remark, with apologies to all. Obviously, “Ockham and Bentham and James” were three-fourths of Notre Dame’s famous “Four Horsemen” backfield, immortalized by Grantland Rice in 1924. The fourth horseman, as I recall, was Ronald Reagan, aka “George Gipp”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball%27s_Sad_Lexicon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_(American_football)

³ I should note that, according to Orlando Figes, at the outset of the 20^th century “There was a general feeling that Russian civilization was doomed.”

⁴ I am citing Churchill, of course, but I will wager that some Russian (Pobedonostsev?) said something similar.