The Little Red Blog

The Death of Consensus Reality

"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." (William Butler Yeats, 1920)

Allow me to recommend an intriguing book from 2015: Stranger Than We Can Imagine, by John Higgs, an attempt at, as the book's subtitle explains, Making sense of the twentieth century. Rather than focus, as so many have done, on the astonishing carnage of the century’s wars, revolutions, and genocides, Higgs grounds his survey in what he believes to have been “a chaotic seismic shift” in the prevailing worldview of the West, a shift which “upended all linear narratives” and undermined all established authority. The change of consciousness took place across the board: in science, art, music, and literature; in the collapse of national empires and imperial dynasties; in politics, media, education, sexual mores, gender roles, and more. The shock of the new, as it has been called, changed everything; essentially, Higgs claims, we are all modernists now.

Think of Stranger Than We Can Imagine as an attempt to flesh out Virginia Woolf’s cryptic statement, “On or about December 1910 human nature changed.” John Higgs does not assign a date to the change in worldview he documents, but he estimates it to have begun early in the last century. The radicalism of the shift cannot be overstated: beginning with Einstein’s “General Theory of Relativity,” objective truth was replaced by multiple perspectives, objective reality became subjective realities, Schrodinger’s cat was simultaneously dead and alive, and the observer was understood to influence what was being observed. Consensus reality became a matter of opinion, and there was no accepted authority to arbitrate disputes over alternative facts.

Since the publisher’s blurb (at Amazon) provides a perfectly good summary, I see no reason to reinvent the wheel:

In Stranger Than We Can Imagine, John Higgs argues that before 1900, history seemed to make sense. We can understand innovations like electricity, [mechanized] agriculture, and democracy. The twentieth century, in contrast, gave us relativity, cubism, quantum mechanics, the id, existentialism, Stalin, psychedelics, chaos mathematics, climate change, and postmodernism.

In order to understand such a disorienting barrage of unfamiliar and knotty ideas, Higgs shows us, we need to shift the framework of our interpretation and view these concepts within the context of a new kind of historical narrative. Instead of looking at it as another step forward in a stable path, we need to look at the twentieth century as a chaotic seismic shift, upending all linear narratives.

Higgs invites us along as he journeys across a century “about which we know too much” in order to grant us a new perspective on it. He brings a refreshingly non-academic, eclectic, and infectiously energetic approach to his subjects as well as a unique ability to explain how complex ideas connect and intersect—whether he’s discussing Einstein’s theories of relativity, the Beat poets' interest in Eastern thought or the bright spots and pitfalls of the American Dream.

Higgs takes us on quite a ride, one that begins with a French anarchist, Martial Bourdin, who accidentally blew himself up in 1894 while enroute, with his homemade bomb, to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England. Anarchism, for John Higgs, though a 19^th-century development, could be the key word of the 20^th century, anarchism being here defined as the absence of a fixed point of reference. Higgs quotes the famed avant-garde artist Marcel Duchamp on the importance of “persistent attempts to destroy frames of reference.” Ultimately, says Higgs, the theme that permeated the twentieth century was this: “A single viewpoint was insufficient to express or describe anything.” Building on Einstein’s “revolution” of relativity, Western culture seized on (or was seized by) “the idea that there was no single perspective which can be considered to be correct or true, and that our knowledge of any subject is dependent on the perspective we take.”

In which case, the individual assumed increased importance, since every individual was (or might be) an omphalos, that is, a center of reality. Higgs notes that “support for individualism had been slowly building for centuries, but few people had been willing it to take it to its logical conclusion.” That conclusion? “When the bonds of hierarchy [and authority] were shattered, you were left with the multiple perspectives of a host of separate individuals.” Inevitably, in the modern West, “the self is the focus and is given precedence over wider society.” Were modern individuals autonomous or were they atomized, or were they both at once? Higgs suspects the latter, and he offers illustrative examples from the life and works of such notables as Aleister Crowley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ayn Rand.

The pitfalls of individualism were not difficult to spot, but its largest flaw, as Higgs explained, was that its proponents believed that “an individual was a self-contained, rational agent with free will.” Alas, Higgs informs us, “The truth turned out to be considerably messier.” And on the story goes, with Freud, Jung, and other explorers of the human psyche, especially of its sordid side, demolishing the pretensions of rational selfhood. Higgs continues tracing connections in all directions—science, philosophy, art, politics, etc.—before reaching, about one-third of the way into Stranger Than We Can Imagine, this juncture:

“Genocides arose during the perfect storm of technology, nationalism, individualism, and the political rise of psychopaths [Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao]. They revealed that human beings were not the rational actors they prided themselves on being, dutifully building a better world year after year. Rationality was the product of the conscious mind, but that mind rested on the irrational foundations of the unconscious. The original was more complicated than originally assumed; if there was some form of certainty to be found in the world, it wouldn’t be found in the immaterial world of the mind.”

I will leave it, for now, at that. Stranger Than We Can Imagine is a superbly written and engrossing look at how we got here—that is, to the twenty-first century, where reality is more fractured than ever, where perspectives multiply and shift, where we might be living in a simulation, where “the simple things we see are all complicated,” and where certainty is nowhere to be found.       

Wednesday with Pascal: The Triumph of Mammon

{As I understand the provenance of the following, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat found excerpts from R.H. Tawney’s ‘Religion and the Rise of Capitalism’ stuffed into a bottle that had washed up on the banks of the Madison River near Three Forks, Montana. Who placed the pages into the bottle? How long had it been floating down the river? Where did it originate? We simply cannot know, and Pascal seems uninterested. Unusually for him, he has appended no commentary to what follows, thereby tacitly endorsing (perhaps) Tawney’s observations on the fundamental incompatibility of Christianity and Capitalism.}  

“No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other; or else he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” (Gospel of Matthew)

From the conclusion of Richard H. Tawney’s classic Religion and the Rise of Capitalism:

Economic efficiency is a necessary element in the life of any sane and vigorous society, and only the incorrigible sentimentalist will depreciate its significance. But to convert efficiency from an instrument into a primary object is to destroy efficiency itself. For the condition of effective action in a complex civilization is cooperation. And the condition of cooperation is agreement, both as to ends to which effort should be applied, and the criteria by which its success is to be judged.

Agreement as to ends implies the acceptance of a standard of values. In a world of limited resources, where nature yields a return only to prolonged and systematic effort, such a standard must obviously take account of economic possibilities. But the standard cannot itself be merely economic, since the comparative importance of economic and of other interests—the foregoing, for example, of material goods in order to extend leisure, or develop education, or humanize toil—is precisely the point on which it is needed to throw light. It must be based on some conception of the requirements of human nature, to which the satisfaction of economic needs is evidently vital, but which demands the satisfaction of other needs as well, and which can organize its activities on a rational system only in so far as it has a clear apprehension of their relative significance.

The most obvious facts are the most easily forgotten. Both the existing economic order, and too many of the projects advanced for reconstructing it, break down through their neglect of the truism that, since even quite common men have souls, no increase in material wealth will compensate them for arrangements which insult their self-respect and impair their freedom. A reasonable estimate of economic organization must allow for the fact that, unless industry is to be paralyzed by recurrent revolts on the part of outraged human nature, it must satisfy criteria which are not purely economic. A reasonable view must recognize that natural appetites may be purified or restrained, as, in fact, in some considerable measure they already have been, by being submitted to the control of some larger body of interests. The distinction made by the philosophers of classical antiquity between liberal and servile occupation; the medieval insistence that riches exist for man, not man for riches; Ruskin’s famous outburst, “there is no wealth but life”; the argument of the Socialist who urges that production should be organized for service, not for profit; are but different attempts to emphasize the instrumental character of economic activities by reference to an ideal which is held to express the true nature of man.

Of that nature and its possibilities, the Christian Church was thought, during the greater part of the period discussed in these pages, to hold a conception distinctively its own. It was therefore committed to the formulation of a social theory as a vital element in a creed concerned with the destiny of men whose character is formed, and whose spiritual potentialities are fostered or starved, by the commerce of the marketplace and the institutions of society. Stripped of the eccentricities of period and place, the Church’s philosophy had as its center a determination to assert the superiority of moral principles over economic appetites, which have their place, and an important place, in the human scheme, but which, like other natural appetites, when flattered and pampered and overfed, bring ruin to the soul and confusion to society. Its casuistry was an attempt to translate these principles into a code of practical ethics, sufficiently precise to be applied to the dusty world of warehouse and farm. Its discipline was an effort, too often corrupt and pettifogging in practice, but not ignoble in conception, to work the Christian virtues into the spotted texture of individual character and social conduct. That such a practice was often a sorry parody on theory is a truism which should need no emphasis. But in a world where principles and conduct are unequally matched, men are to be judged by their reach as well as by their grasp—by the ends at which they aim as well as by the success with which they attain them.

Circumstances alter from age to age, and the practical interpretation of moral principles must alter with them. Few who consider dispassionately the facts of social history will deny that the exploitation of the weak by the powerful has been a permanent feature in the life of most communities that the world has yet seen. But the quality in modern societies which is most sharply opposed to the teaching ascribed to Jesus consists in the assumption that the attainment of material riches is the supreme object of human endeavor and the final criterion of human success. 

Such a philosophy—plausible, militant, and not indisposed, when hard pressed, to silence criticism by persecution—may triumph or may decline. What is certain is that it is the negation of any system of thought or morals which can, except by a metaphor, be described as Christian. Compromise is as impossible between the Church of Christ and the idolatry of wealth, which is the practical religion of capitalist societies, as it was between the Church and the State idolatry of the Roman Empire.

“Modern capitalism,” writes Mr. Keynes, “is absolutely irreligious, without internal union, without much public spirit, often, though not always, a mere congeries of possessors and pursuers.” It is that whole system of appetites and values, with its deification of the life of snatching to hoard, and hoarding to snatch, which now, in the hour of its triumph, seems sometimes to leave a taste as of ashes on the lips of a civilization which has brought to the conquest of its material environment resources unknown in earlier ages, but which has not yet learned to master itself. It was against that system, while still in its supple and insinuating youth, before success had caused it to throw aside the mask of innocence, and while its true nature was unknown even to itself, that the saints and sages of earlier ages launched their warnings and their denunciations.

The language in which theologians and preachers expressed their horror of the sin of covetousness may appear to the modern reader too murkily sulphurous; their precepts on the contracts of business and the disposition of property may seem an impracticable pedantry. But rashness is a more agreeable failing than cowardice, and, when to speak is unpopular, it is less pardonable to be silent than to say too much.

Sunday Sermon: "Political World"

Political World (by Bob Dylan)

We live in a political world
Love don’t have any place
We’re living in times where men commit crimes
And crime don’t have a face

We live in a political world
Icicles hanging down
Wedding bells ring and angels sing
Clouds cover up the ground

We live in a political world
Wisdom is thrown into jail
It rots in a cell, is misguided as hell
Leaving no one to pick up a trail

We live in a political world
Where mercy walks the plank
Life is in mirrors, death disappears
Up the steps into the nearest bank

We live in a political world
Where courage is a thing of the past
Houses are haunted, children are unwanted
The next day could be your last

We live in a political world
The one we can see and can feel
But there’s no one to check, it’s all a stacked deck
We all know for sure that it’s real

We live in a political world
In the cities of lonesome fear
Little by little you turn in the middle
But you’re never sure why you’re here

We live in a political world
Under the microscope
You can travel anywhere and hang yourself there
You always got more than enough rope

We live in a political world
Turning and a-thrashing about
As soon as you’re awake, you’re trained to take
What looks like the easy way out

We live in a political world
Where peace is not welcome at all
It’s turned away from the door to wander some more
Or put up against the wall

We live in a political world
Everything is hers or his
Climb into the frame and shout God’s name
But you’re never sure what it is

Copyright © 1989 by Special Rider Music

(13) Bob Dylan - Political World (Official HD Video) - YouTube

Saturday Lecture: On Living with Ambivalence

{Charles Mathewes’ ‘The Republic of Grace’ was subtitled ‘Augustinian Thoughts for Dark Times’. Published in 2010, it was a specifically Christian theological response to 9/11, to the War on Terror, and to the economic shocks of 2008—2009. In the interest of clarity, I have taken liberties with Mathewes’ text, removing the theological language and the references to 9/11; I do not believe, however, that I have altered Mathewes’ meaning.}

Charles Mathewes, from The Republic of Grace (2010):

Humans live in an irreducibly ambivalent and ambiguous condition, requiring a structurally and existentially ambivalent attitude [on our part].

Today we find such ambivalence hard to countenance in others, much less affirm for ourselves. We live in a time that is deeply intolerant—perhaps even fearful—of ambiguity and ambivalence, and we are often hostile to those among us who offer anything less than an unqualified endorsement of our human condition. But, in fact, that condition is as deeply ambiguous as it ever was; what has changed is that our world today is far better equipped [than in the past] with devices and desires that enable our escapism. How many people among us have killed our own meat? How many have seen loved ones die prematurely? How many have even had a tooth pulled without novocaine? The degree to which we have shielded ourselves from the more fundamental facts of reality, from suffering and death, is astonishing; just as astonishing is our avoidance of the fact of that avoidance. It is possible today to go through life relatively successfully (until the end, at least) ignoring the basic condition of our existence. Our hostility towards and suspicion of ambivalence is not a sign of a more mature spiritual condition; rather, it is an effect of our ability to avoid reality.

This, I submit, is the danger we face: a willed blindness to the basic character of our situation. It is a fundamental human flaw throughout history, but it is especially prevalent today. To correct for it, you must learn, patiently and meticulously, to notice the world for what it is, recognizing not just the things you expect to see there, but also those things that do not fit into your expectations. And that means you will never be able fully to affirm any one thing—the contrary examples will serve as a counterpoint to perforate any too-seamless confidence. Honest apprehension of our condition will never be wholeheartedly on one side or the other of anything.

Both politically and, even more broadly, existentially, we face the difficult task of trying to inhabit an inevitably sinful life, retaining a sense of its sinfulness, and yet not trying to deny that our life is, after all, blessed with its own real goods. We should do so recognizing that our inhabitation of it involves a certain suffering on our part.

To understand life in its full ambivalence, including the discomfiting condition of having to endure as much as to enjoy our existence, requires the traditional virtues of faith, hope, and love. While the virtues have a natural structure, we always encounter them as somewhat disarranged—disarranged, both because we only partially inhabit them and because our world always presses more heavily and immediately on one more than on the others. In our contemporary setting, the proper order in which to address them is hope, faith, and love. Today, existence presses most immediately upon our hope, with terror [and despair]; then on our faith, with temptations toward various idolatries; and then last (but probably most profoundly), with temptations toward a consumerist pursuit of shallow and diversionary pleasures.

Understood in these terms, we exist in the midst of three interacting dynamics—sometimes canceling each other out, sometimes reinforcing one another—that collectively challenge our ability to live the sorts of lives shaped by the virtues we claim to admire. The challenge is a matter of discernment, and what we see and don’t see is just as important as what we do and don’t do.  

___________________________

Biographical sketch for Charles Mathewes: | Department of Religious Studies

(virginia.edu)

I Think, Therefore I Am Ambivalent

Wednesday with Pascal: The Wasteland of Modernity

{Hiding out somewhere in Montana’s tri-city area (Pony, Willow Creek, and Three Forks), Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has somehow come across a copy of a book by the late Ivan Ilyin, a controversial Russian philosopher. I have no idea whether Pascal agrees with Ilyin’s ideas or whether he just likes having found something by a Russian author.}

Ivan Ilyin (1883--1954) was a Russian philosopher, an opponent of Bolshevism, a Fascist sympathizer, and, at least intermittently, an anti-Semite. Ilyin had the dubious honor of having been expelled from Russia by Lenin and having fled Germany during Hitler’s regime. Ilyin’s work has been rediscovered in post-Soviet Russia, where it has influenced the likes of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Dugin, and even Vladimir Putin. The Foundation of Christian Culture was written in 1937, just before World War II. ¹ As the following excerpt indicates, the book was an indictment of secular modernity, which makes it relevant for today’s culture warriors and for the culture wars they continue waging. 

This is from Ilyin’s opening chapter:

Everything that has occurred in the twentieth century, and continues today, is proof of the fact that Christianity is suffering a crisis. Massive swathes of the population have lost their living faith and have left the Christian churches. Within the limits of what was formerly Christendom, there is a wide anti-Christian front that has tried to create an un-Christian and anti-Christian culture. This phenomenon is not a new one. The twentieth century, following in the footsteps of the nineteenth, only manifests a process that has been developing for centuries. The process of separation of culture from faith, religion, and the Church began a long time ago. It has been going on for several centuries. In Europe and America, ‘secular culture’ and secularization itself can trace their beginnings all the way to the Renaissance.

During the first millennium and a half after the birth of Christ, the situation was radically different. There could be many reasons for this. Possibly, people in general were more trusting, their spiritual makeup less complex and variegated, more instinctive, even irrational; therefore, more modest and spiritually careful. Perhaps the divine origin of the Gospel was more immediately apparent, more vividly and profoundly experienced. Perhaps man did not yet feel himself to be the master of nature, but one subjected to nature’s whims. Or maybe life was simply more chaotic and more fraught. However it may be, it was during this time period that people in Christendom considered religion to be the center of their life, its most important (or possibly its exclusive) source of existence and meaning. ²

For the last four centuries, and especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, all this radically changed. Even the end of the Middle Ages contained within itself the seeds of these changes; and we are the ones having to reap what those centuries sowed.

European culture of the nineteenth century was in essence already secular and desacralized. Science, art, law, agriculture, worldview, cosmology—all these were thoroughly secularized. The culture of our own time continues this separation from Christianity, but not only from Christianity; contemporary culture is losing its religious spirit, its meaning, and its beauty. It has not turned to any new religion, nor has it even started to seek anything of the sort. Having separated from Christianity, it has gone into an a-religious, godless wasteland. Mankind has not only ceased to contemplate, develop, and preserve the experience of the Christian church, but it has brought fruit to no other religious experience at all. It has left Christianity, but it wanders the wasteland aimlessly.

____________________________________

Ivan Ilyin - Wikipedia

 ¹ According to Wikipedia, Ilyin was among those exiled by Lenin in 1923 on the famous “Philosophers’ Ship”. Wikipedia goes on to offer this fascinating report:

Until 1934, Ilyin cooperated with Nikolai Berdyaev on Russian Religious Renaissance. In “On resisting evil by force,” he advocated the use of violence in the struggle against Bolshevism, which he regarded as despotism. He criticized the anarchist and pacifist ideology of Tolstoy. He called for the courage to "arrest, condemn, and shoot," which Maxim Gorky called a "gospel of revenge"; Berdyaev compared Ilyin’s proposal to a "Cheka of God" and described it as “legalism devoid of grace”. Zinaida Gippius called Ilyin’s book "military field theology"; according to her, "Ilyin is not a philosopher who writes books, not a publicist who writes press releases: he is a man possessed running amok." In other words, he was a typical member of the Russian intelligentsia. 

² Ilyin could have added that village life in pre-modern Europe was arranged around liturgical calendars (e.g., feast days of saints were occasions for civic festivities); religion was not an individual matter but a communal and social obligation—dissenters, heretics, and non-conformists were met with scorn, if not worse. Local priests wielded an authority that was rarely questioned. Not surprisingly, what religious dissent there was came from the educated classes, from the leisured nobility, and from the monasteries and the universities: all of them potential sources of heterodox opinions, as they remain to this day.

Will America Succumb to the "Europe Syndrome"?

{I discovered Charles Murray’s “Out of the Wilderness” in a 2012 book titled "Future Tense," a collection of essays by conservative authors. According to Murray, modern Western civilization is running out of geniuses, artists, and innovators because modern life is too easy and because people (in the developed western world) no longer need to fear starvation, destitution, or early death. Only when existence is precarious are people motivated to create; given comfort and security, they tend to vegetate instead.}

Ten years ago, Charles Murray—a political scientist best known as a fierce critic of the “welfare state”—feared that what he called the “Europe Syndrome” was taking root in America. As he explained it, the Europe Syndrome is a worldview that “starts with a conception of humanity that is devoid of any element of the divine or even specialness. Humans are not intrinsically better or more important than other life forms, including trees. The Europe Syndrome sees human beings as collections of chemicals that are activated and, after a period of time, deactivated.” ¹

Setting aside the possibility that the Europe Syndrome was entirely a figment of Charles Murray’s imagination, it sounds utterly appalling. According to Murray, for those afflicted by the Europe Syndrome, “The purpose of life is to while away the intervening time between birth and death as pleasantly as possible.” ² Can you even imagine? Murray insisted, disapprovingly, that “this way of looking at life is fundamentally incompatible with a stream of major accomplishments in the arts.” Were Europe’s people for the most part better fed, better housed, or better educated? Were they healthier? Were they living longer? Murray did not seem interested in such prosaic matters; where, he asked, were the geniuses, the virtuosos, the cream of the crop? Where was the new Mozart, Michelangelo, or Dante?

One symptom of the Europe Syndrome is an aging population, about which Murray expressed his concern. “The aging of the population is happening not only because of low birth rates,” he noted, “but also because life expectancy is increasing.” Cause for celebration? Not for Charles Murray: “This leads to another phenomenon without historic precedent: the removal of the constant psychological awareness that one’s own death could happen at any time.” ³ Murray lamented, “The early death of a close friend or family member happens so rarely in the lives of most people that it has become an anomaly—today, we see the deaths of people in their sixties described as ‘untimely’. Our baseline assumption is that we’re going to live to old age. How is this affecting the human desire to achieve?” Blessed are the bereaved, for they shall be motivated to seize the day!

Murray elaborated his thesis regarding the salutary psychological effects of early, unexpected death:

“In a world where people of all ages die, often unexpectedly, there’s a palpable urgency to getting on with whatever you’re going to do with your life.⁴ If you don’t leave your mark now, you may never get the chance. If you live in a world where you’re sure you’re going to live to at least eighty, do you have the same compulsion to leave your mark now? Or do you figure that there’s still plenty of time left, and that you’ll get to it soon. ⁵ To what extent does enjoying life—since you can be sure there’s going to be so much to enjoy—start to take precedence over maniacal efforts to make a mark?” ⁶

I will now quote Murray at greater length so that his argument receives a fair hearing:

“This problem [of increased longevity] fits neatly with the problems associated with increased secularism and the increased material security provided by the advanced welfare state. In a world where death can come at any time, there is also a clear and present motivation to think about spiritual matters even when you are young. Who knows when you’re going to meet your Maker? It could easily be tomorrow. If you’re going to live to be at least eighty, it’s a lot easier not to think about the prospect of non-existence. The world before the welfare state didn’t give you the option of just passing the time pleasantly. Your main resources for living a comfortable life—or even for surviving at all—were hard work and family (especially, having children to support you in your old age). In the advanced welfare state, neither of those is necessary. The state will make sure you have a job (one that doesn’t require you to work too hard), and it will support you in your old age.

The advanced welfare state drains too much of the life from life. When there’s no family, no community, no sense of vocation, and no faith, nothing is left but to pass the time away as pleasantly as possible. ⁷ Put all three conditions together—no urgency to make your mark, no promptings to think about your place in the cosmos, no difficulty in living a comfortable life—and you get what I call the Europe Syndrome.”

Oh, for the good old days, when life was nasty, brutish, and short! Why, oh why, did we ever try to make life better, easier, more enjoyable, and, worst of all, longer? Hubris!

Ten years after “Out of the Wilderness,” Murray can take heart. The COVID pandemic killed off over a million Americans, many of them superannuated and presumably useless; it also put the fear of God and of untimely death into the survivors. The resultant global economic shock forced families to cluster together indoors, brought people together in community (aka “angry mobs”), siphoned trillions of dollars from the world’s bulging coffers, and led to more suicides and “deaths of despair”. Just as the Great Depression of the Thirties and the Great Recession of 2008—2011 deprived people of material security, thereby liberating their creativity and ingenuity, the COVID pandemic thinned the herd and gave people pause regarding their long-term life prospects (or anyone else’s).

In short: If discomfort, anxiety, and insecurity are part of Murray’s recipe for success, we have the ingredients at hand. Let's get cooking!

________________________

Charles Murray (political scientist) - Wikipedia

¹ Murray’s observation helps explain the modern European custom of substituting chemical symbols for people’s names, and the engravings on tombstones that read (for example) “Activated November 24, 1948—Deactivated ???” It also accounts for why Europeans greet each other by asking, “How are your chemicals doing today?”

 ² Make of it what you will, but the U.S. suicide rate is substantially higher than that of the countries of western Europe, despite the latter being infected with Europe Syndrome. Is it possible that our God-given right to “the pursuit of happiness” has become demoralizing? Is it possible that Charles Murray is full of, um, it?

³ It is a well-known fact, memorably stated by Samuel Johnson, that the prospect of one’s imminent death “concentrates the mind wonderfully”. (See also “Sword of Damocles”.)  

⁴ The relevant maxim here is: Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking corpse. As Aristotle said, “Call no man happy until he is dead, and the sooner the better.”

⁵ “The problem is we think we have time.”

⁶ Murray here uses the word “maniacal” in a positive sense. His argument, by the way, mirrors that of Ernest Bloch in The Denial of Death, the difference being that Bloch emphasized the negative side of our maniacal compulsions while Murray worried about our losing them.

⁷ The horror!

Sunday Sermon: "The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar"

“The Groom’s Still Waiting at the Altar” (Bob Dylan)

Prayed in the ghetto with my face in the cement
Heard the last moan of a boxer, seen the massacre of the innocent
Felt around for the light switch, felt around for her face
Been treated like a farm animal on a wild goose chase

West of Jordan, east of the Rock of Gibraltar
I see the turning of the page
Curtain rising on a new age
See the groom still waiting at the altar

Try to be pure at heart, they arrest you for robbery
Mistake your shyness for aloofness, your silence for snobbery
Got the message this morning, the one that was sent to me
About the madness of becoming what one was never meant to be

West of Jordan, east of the Rock of Gibraltar
I see the turning of the page
Curtain rising on a new age
See the groom still waiting at the altar

Don't know what I can say about Claudette wouldn't come back to haunt me
Finally had to give her up about the time she began to want me
But I know God has mercy on them who are slandered and humiliated
I'd a-done anything for that woman if she'd only make me feel obligated

West of Jordan, east of the Rock of Gibraltar
I see the turning of the page
Curtain rising on a new age
See the groom still waiting at the altar

Put your hand on my head, baby, do I have a temperature?
I see people who are supposed to know better standing around like furniture
There's a wall between you and what you want and you got to leap it
Tonight you got the power to take it, tomorrow you won't have the power to keep it

West of Jordan, east of the Rock of Gibraltar
I see the turning of the page
Curtain rising on a new age
See the groom still waiting at the altar

Cities on fire, phones out of order
They're killing nuns and soldiers, there's fighting on the border
What can I say about Claudette?
Ain't seen her since January
She could be respectfully married or running a whorehouse in Buenos Aires

West of Jordan, east of the Rock of Gibraltar
I see the turning of the page
Curtain rising on a new age
See the groom still waiting at the altar

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Bob Dylan

The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Grou

(11) Bob Dylan - The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar (Official Audio) - YouTube

Rod Stewart cover: (11) Rod Stewart The Groom's Stil Waiting At The Altar (Rare Track) - YouTube

Saturday Lecture: "Sacrosanct Shibboleths"

{The following reflections are from Roger Kimball, editor of The New Criterion and, from the evidence, a dyed-in-the-wool Anglophile. The first selection was written in 2012, as Preface to a collection of essays titled Future Tense: The Future of Culture in an Age of Upheaval; the second is excerpted from Kimball’s “The Right Targets,” which appeared in January 2022. It may be instructive to note the shift in tone (from thoughtful to hysterical) which took place over the course of a decade, and which may reflect changes in the conservative movement (or at least its rhetoric); or it may simply reflect the fact that Kimball, like many on the Right, appears to have lost his mind.¹}  

Roger Kimball, from Future Tense (2012):

Writing in the early 1960s, towards the end of his life, Evelyn Waugh had this to say about Rudyard Kipling’s reputation as a ‘conservative’:

“He believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defenses fully manned, and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.” ¹

That appreciation of the fragility of civilization—the insight that our enabling cultural habits and institutions must constantly be renewed or fail—is at the heart of contemporary conservatism’s critical mission. Civilization, we conservatives know, is not a gift but an achievement, difficult of attainment but all too easy to forfeit. The barbarians who would tear it down are not only at the gates but deep within us. As Waugh, writing at the end of the 1930s, put it: “We are all potential recruits for anarchy.”

The work of preserving society is sometimes onerous, sometimes almost effortless. The more elaborate the society, the more vulnerable it is to attack, and the more complete its collapse in case of defeat. At a time like the present, it is notably precarious. If it falls, we shall see not only the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.

Every age thinks itself uniquely privileged and uniquely problematic. But as we look back across history, we recognize certain periods in which inherited habits and institutions are suddenly unsettled in a fundamental way—those ‘plastic moments’ that Karl Marx talked about, when many taken-for-granted assumptions about the configuration of society and the shared values that order our lives together seem curiously up for grabs.

We in America, in the West generally, are in the midst of such a revolution in sentiment. There is a growing sense of uneasiness, of anxiety. The law; the economy; the political prospects; changes in our intellectual habits wrought by changes in our technology; the destiny that is demography: America, the West, indeed the entire world in the early years of the twenty-first century, seems unsettled. Things we have taken for granted seem suddenly up for grabs in some fundamental if still difficult-to-grasp way. Fissures have opened among the confidences we had always assumed—in the market, in national identity, in the basics of social order and cultural value. Future tense: the always hazardous art of cultural prognostication seems more brittle now, more uneasy, more tentative.

***************************************

Roger Kimball, from “The Right Targets” (2022):

The woke culture of the Left seeks to destroy not only America as we know it but also the political, moral, and economic foundations upon which it rests. The conflagration is partly physical, as we saw and see on city streets throughout the country. It is also partly spiritual, as the most basic human realities and aspirations are deconstructed and politicized. When the criterion of merit and the ideal of disinterested judgment are rejected as white, patriarchal tools of oppression, or racial and sexual identity are elevated into sacrosanct shibboleths of election, we are cast into a vertiginous, all-consuming whirlpool of nihilistic self-engorgement.

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¹ Dan Quayle, circa 1992: “What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful.” A 2018 article by John Ganz (at The Baffler) examines “The Decline of The New Criterion” and the pretensions of Roger Kimball: The Decline of The New Criterion | John Ganz (thebaffler.com)

The right targets | The New Criterion

Roger Kimball - Wikipedia

Now Be Thankful

“Now Be Thankful”

When the stone is grown too cold to kneel
In crystal waters I'll be bound
Cold as stone, weary to the sounds upon the wheel

Now be thankful for good things below
Now be thankful to your maker
For the rose, the red rose blooms for all to know

When the fire is grown too fierce to breathe
In burning irons I'll be bound
Fierce as fire weary to the sounds upon the wheel

Now be thankful for good things below
Now be thankful to your maker
For the rose, the red rose blooms for all to know

When the stone is grown too cold to kneel
In crystal waters I'll be bound
Cold as stone, weary to the sounds upon the wheel

Now be thankful for good things below
Now be thankful to your maker
For the rose, the red rose blooms for all to know

(Written by Richard Thompson & Dave Swarbrick; recorded by Fairport Convention)

(10) Now Be Thankful (Stereo Mix) - YouTube

(10) Now Be Thankful - Richard and Linda Thompson (Live 1975) - YouTube

 

 

Wednesday with Pascal: Separation of Church and Market

{Pascal the self-exiled existential Russian blue cat continues to submit his weekly posts. He is rumored to have settled somewhere in Montana’s famous “tri-city” area (Pony, Three Forks, and Willow Creek), also known as the “Tobacco Root Triangle,” after the nearby mountain range. Wherever he is, he continues to have a bee in his feline bonnet about capitalism, Christianity, and what he perceives as the unlikely and unholy alliance of the two.)

The British historian Richard H. Tawney (1880—1962) was a Christian Socialist ¹ whose work—including his two best known books, The Acquisitive Society and Religion and the Rise of Capitalism—was suffused with moral earnestness and a nostalgia for the Catholic integralism of the Middle Ages. ² According to Tawney, religion and moral values in medieval Europe were closely linked to economics and politics, and vice-versa; which is to say, markets were not exempt from morals. Modernity then ushered in the notion of “non-overlapping magisteria,” separate realms of authority that need not compete, argue, nor intrude upon each other’s claims, e.g., religion and science, but also religion and politics, and, crucially for Tawney’s argument, religion and economics.  

His argument was that what we might call “the separation of Church and Market” was as disastrous (morally and socially) as it was miraculous (economically). The retreat of medieval ecclesiastical authority was unquestionably a critical factor in the rise of modernity; among other things, it cleared the ground for economic expansion and for the accumulation and investment of capital. ³

Tawney believed the Reformation simultaneously weakened the Church (by turning it into churches) and strengthened the individual (“Every man his own priest”), with incalculable consequences for both:   

No one can read the economic discussions which took place between 1500 and 1550 without being struck by the constant appeal from the new and clamorous economic interests of the day to the traditional Christian morality, which in social organization, as in the relations of individuals, was still conceived to be the final authority. It was [for that reason] that the officers of the Church claimed to be heard on questions of social policy; and, however much Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Calvinists may have differed on doctrine or ecclesiastical government, they were agreed that social morality was the province of the Church, and they were prepared both to teach it, and to enforce it, when necessary, by suitable discipline.

By the middle of the seventeenth century all that was altered, [replaced by] a new world of economic, as well as of political, thought. The claim of religion to maintain rules of good conscience in economic affairs finally vanished. The attempt to maintain that there was a Christian standard of economic conduct was impossible, not only because of lay opposition, but because the division of the Churches made it evident that no common standard existed which could be enforced by ecclesiastical machinery. The doctrine that, as proved by the experience of Holland, trade and tolerance flourished together, had its practical significance in the fact that neither could prosper without large concessions to individualism.

The problem, of course, was that individuals were no longer protected, in the new dispensation, from greed and economic rapacity. The economic order was released (on its own recognizance) from the moral tutelage of the Ten Commandments and placed instead under the authority of its own newly discovered (or invented) “laws,” laws which made poverty inevitable (or so it was claimed) and amelioration of poverty impossible. The modern economy, like modern government, was conceived as “a machine that would go of itself” (the phrase comes from James Russell Lowell) so long as it was left to its own devices:

The ground which was vacated by the Christian moralist was quickly occupied by theorists of another order. The future for the next two hundred years would be not with the attempt to reaffirm the conception that a moral rule was binding on Christians in their economic transactions, but with the new science of Political Arithmetic, which asserted, at first with hesitation and then with confidence, that no moral rule beyond the letter of the law exists. Influenced in its method by the contemporary progress of mathematics and physics, it handled economic phenomena, not as a casuist concerned to distinguish right from wrong, but as a scientist, applying a new calculus to impersonal economic forces. Its method, temper, and assumptions were accepted by all educated men, including the clergy, even though its particular conclusions continued for long to be disputed. In short, there was a transition, and the intellectual and moral conversion which it produced was not less momentous than the effect of some more familiar intellectual revolutions.

Like any good Socialist, Tawney understood that man’s social environment helped form (and restrict) his ideas as well as his actions. Whatever “human nature” may be in the wild, it has long since been tamed and transformed by society and culture (including religion):

There is an evolution of ideas, as well as of organisms, and the quality of civilization depends on the transmission, less of physical qualities, than of a complex structure of habits, knowledge, and beliefs, the destruction of which would be followed within a year by the death of half the human race. Granted that the groundwork of inherited dispositions with which the individual is born has altered little in recorded history, the interests and values which compose his world have undergone a succession of revolutions. The conventional statement that human nature does not change is plausible only so long as attention is focused on those aspects of it which are least distinctively human. The wolf is today what he was when he was hunted by Nimrod. But, while men are born with many of the characteristics of wolves, man is a wolf domesticated, who both transmits the arts by which he has been partially tamed and improves upon them. He steps into a social inheritance, to which each generation adds its own contribution of good and evil, before it bequeaths it to its successors.

What we came to call Homo Economicus (Economic Man) was invented, not discovered, by capitalism’s priests and prophets, who solemnly instructed the masses that the business of modern man is business; that they must submit to the Invisible Hand; that there is no such thing as a free lunch; and that loafers and idlers, shirkers and malingerers, redistributionists and bleeding-hearted reformers are not welcome in the House of Mammon:

There is a moral and religious, as well as a material, environment which sets its stamp on the individual, even when he is least conscious of it. And the effect of changes in this environment is not less profound. The economic categories of modern society, such as property, freedom of contract and competition, are as much a part of its intellectual furniture as its political conceptions, and, together with religion, have probably been the most potent force in giving it its character. Between the conception of society as a community of unequal classes with varying functions, organized for a common end, and that which regards it as a mechanism adjusting itself through the play of economic motives to the supply of economic needs; between the idea that a man must not take advantage of his neighbor’s necessity, and the doctrine that “man’s self-love is God’s providence”; between the attitude which appeals to a religious standard to repress economic appetites, and that which regards expediency as the final criterion—there is a chasm which no theory of the permanence and ubiquity of economic interests can bridge.

If economic motives, needs, and interests are what matter most, then we modern Americans, for the past seventy years, have had our priorities in order. If we have been mistaken, however, we might want to consider re-ordering our lives accordingly.

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R.H. Tawney quotes are from Religion and the Rise of Capitalism

H. Tawney - Wikipedia

¹ Critics who claim that “Christian Socialist” is an oxymoron demonstrate their ignorance of both Christianity and Socialism.

² “Integralism” is an ideology which advocates “the integration of religious authority and political power.” How this differs from theocracy is not altogether clear; in any case, integralism (in some modified form) has its champions even today—the legal scholar Adrian Vermeule of Harvard University, for one. Adrian Vermeule - Wikipedia

³ I am no scriptural exegete, but was not Jesus referring to “the accumulation and investment of capital” when he warned listeners not to “pile up treasure on earth”? Had Jesus been economically literate rather than merely divine, he could have included, in his Sermon on the Mount, the maxim, “A rising tide lifts all boats,” a phrase his closest followers, most of whom were fishermen, would certainly have understood.