Thursday, March 29, A.D. 2012

Did “The Great Society” Ruin Society?

The Left frequently depicts American misery with Dickensian imagery, but how truthful are such tales? We find some surprising statistics at Human Events, where Patrick Buchanan examines American poverty in “Did ‘The Great Society’ ruin society?” Poverty in America is not about material destitution but spiritual destitution. The American poor have stuff, but they have no dignity. Vice and violence rule unfettered in the projects, while the lower classes are treated like unaccountable children by the state and by the elite. I am not against paternalism in itself, as I note in “A Place for Us.” However, such concerns for the lesser among us must impose moral standards and cultivate spiritual formation in addition to providing material assistance, as R.R. Reno argues in “The Preferential Option for the Poor.” Voluntary charity and endeavors by the local political community are the best means to assist the poor. Such an arrangement minimizes the feeding of government’s ineffective bureaucratic monster that slowly drags all of society toward managerial benevolent but maleficent totalitarianism, and it ensures that strategies and decisions remain in the power of those who know the relevant facts “on the ground.” We want effective giving rather than the enabling and subsidizing of a permanent, dysfunctional, dysgenic parasitic class.

Posted by Joseph on Thursday, March 29, Anno Domini 2012
Anthropology • Ethics • Politics • (0) Comments • Permalink

Thursday, March 22, A.D. 2012

Political Medicine

When a society no longer orients itself to the common good, there is anarchy. Each man acts for his own gain, and each collection of men that can cooperate to secure a bigger piece of the social pie operates for its own faction’s interests. Every man and every group become pirates on the high seas instead of citizens in a commonwealth. Unfortunately, interest groups and tribal factions have come to dominate America; one might ask what Madison would think about our current state of affairs. These factions do agree on a few points. They all want to channel as many public funds to themselves as they can. Therefore, they all constantly push for the growth of Leviathan: the bigger the state, the more swollen teets of the public sow from which they may suck their nourishment.

One sees this competition to milk the public treasury in the clamoring for medical research funding. One may justly question the government’s spending public money on medical research; a sure way to avoid interest groups’ meddling is to remove the piglets from the sow altogether. However, one may also reasonably assert that promoting health and fighting disease are fitting actions of a state that aims toward the common good. If we accept that, then public funding should favor epidemiology to prevent outbreaks that would threaten social stability or continuity. I would generally follow utilitarian principles to decide funding for lower medical priorities; more money should go to address medical issues that affect more people. We could also add an element of justice to our consideration. It makes more sense to me to fund medical research for diseases that occur through no fault of their victims rather than for conditions that largely result from irresponsible lifestyle choices. Moreover, public health funding may be better allocated in preventing such unhealthy conditions rather than in treating them. For instance, it might be more efficient to promote healthy eating and exercise than to develop better drugs for diabetes.

However, our medical funding decisions follow from the power of interest groups. Consider the funding for HIV/AIDS research. HIV/AIDS is a largely preventable disease. If people acted responsibly, it would mostly disappear. It also affects a small number of Americans compared to other diseases. The Congressional Research Service states that the federal government has funded $337,324,000,000 for HIV/AIDS since A.D. 1982. According to Kaiser Family Foundation, $129,600,000,000 of that has been spent in the last five years. That is a lot of money. AVERT provides the Centers for Disease Control estimate that 1,142,714 people have been diagnosed with AIDS in the United States in the last thirty years. If we add the number of people with HIV, then we get about about 1,500,000 people who have contracted the disease. If we divide the money spent by the feds by the number of diseased people, we find that the federal governments has spent almost $225,000 for each American who has been infected with HIV, and this does not include state or local funding, private funding, or indirect federal funding.

I could not find any comprehensive figures for federal funding for other maladies, but the National Institutes of Health site lists their funds by category. Last year, N.I.H. spent $2,049,000,000 for cardiovascular research, while it spent $3,059,000,000 for HIV/AIDS. About 1,000,000 living Americans had HIV or AIDS last year. So, N.I.H. spent $3,059 on HIV/AIDS per afflicted person. However, according to the C.D.C., almost a quarter of all American deaths result from heart disease. About 1,255,000 Americans have a heart attack every year, and about thirty million Americans have been diagnosed with heart disease. So, N.I.H. spent about $73 on cardiovascular health per person afflicted. That means that N.I.H. spends almost forty-two times as much on HIV/AIDS per person afflicted as on heart disease per person afflicted. How could that be?

There are other examples of politically motivated funding discrepancies. Caroline May examines the difference between breast cancer funding and prostate cancer funding in The Daily Caller:

According to estimates from the National Institutes of Health, in the United States in 2010, 207,090 women and 1,970 men will get new cases of breast cancer, while 39,840 women and 390 men will likely die from the disease. The estimated new cases of prostate cancer this year — all affecting men — is 217,730, while it is predicted 32,050 will die from the disease. . . .

In fiscal year 2009, breast cancer research received $872 million worth of federal funding, while prostate cancer received $390 million. It is estimated that fiscal year 2010 will end similarly, with breast cancer research getting $891 million and prostate cancer research receiving $399 million.

There are more prostate cancer cases than breast cancer cases, and there are four prostate cancer fatalities for every five breast cancer fatalities. However, breast cancer funding is 223% of prostate cancer funding. Why?

Political muscle, of course. Homosexualist organizations see HIV/AIDS as a tribal concern, even though they have tried to convince the public otherwise. Similarly, American women have made pink ribbons omnipresent in society. Not only feminists but average American women have successfully lobbied for increased breast cancer funding. Still, breast cancer funding pales in comparison with HIV/AIDS. The National Cancer Institute estimates that 226,870 women and 2,190 men will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year, while 39,510 women and 410 men will die from the disease. For comparison, around 40,000 HIV diagnoses will occur and 20,000 deaths. However, HIV/AIDS federal funding is over twenty times higher. We do not really know all the factors that lead to breast cancer, but we absolutely know what causes HIV transmission. Why is there this discrepancy? It is because homosexualists care more about HIV/AIDS than women care about breast cancer. Politicans respond to noisy, persistent interest groups, and red ribbons are more convincing than pink ones.

Beyond red and pink, black remains the dominant color when one thinks of identity group politics in America. However, I have long suspected that the “leaders” in the black community—community organizers, you might say—are not very interested in the good of the community that they allegedly represent. Rather, racial shakedown artists like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and their many bros of ill repute are more interested in lining their pockets with corporate extortion money. The black elite lives the life of Riley even as the black community at large becomes ever more dysfunctional and dystopic. Accordingly, I wondered what I would find when I looked into the federal funding of the most visible “black disease”—sickle cell anemia. Heart disease is the number one health problem of black Americans, but as it kills everyone, it is not a championed cause for any particular faction. Well, “Sickle Cell Disease: A Question of Equity and Quality” in Pediatrics confirmed my suspicions:

For example, for fiscal year 2003, the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America’s total revenue was $498,577, compared with $152 million for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, a 300-fold difference that has substantial implications for the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America’s ability to support research and advocacy.

N.I.H. spent $65,000,000 last year on sickle cell disease. The American Society of Hematology estimates that about 90,000 Americans have the condition. That means that N.I.H. spent $722 on sickle cell disease per afflicted person. That is ten times higher than cardiovascular health but less than a fourth of the HIV/AIDS level. Still, given the clout that blacks have as an interest group, it is surprising to see such a low number. J.J. has other concerns; not being a scientist or medical doctor, he cannot ride the medical funding gravy train to a new fleet of Cadillacs.

Posted by Joseph on Thursday, March 22, Anno Domini 2012
Politics • (0) Comments • Permalink

Thursday, March 15, A.D. 2012

Asymmetric Political Warfare

Steve Sailer has an interesting commentary of Ziel’s “Asymmetric Political Warfare” at Your Lying Eyes. Both posts are worthwhile. Ziel writes:

The Republican Party is basically the party of white America, but of course such an entity as “white America” cannot be acknowledged in mainstream outlets (except of course as a source of some evil). A Republican legislator cannot complain that his constituents are being forced to move because their schools are becoming disabled by excessive numbers of non-English speakers or poorly behaved minorities. So instead he must complain about “illegal” immigration in the vaguest of terms and express displeasure with the failure of schools by blaming teacher-unions (bastions of anti-Republican rhetoric). A Democrat, on the other hand, can freely rile up his constituents by denouncing “discrimination” and favoritism, regardless of the facts.

Similarly, any Democrat politician, black or white, can make unlimited hay over alleged racial profiling among the police or “institutional racism” in the law enforcement. But no Republican politician would dare court white voters by defending the police, pointing out, for example, the disproportionately high levels of criminal behavior in the black community. When it was recently revealed that some NYPD officers had the nerve to complain on a facebook page about having to work during the West-Indian Day parade which annually features gun-fire and police injuries, who came to their defense, pointing out that people who engage in gunfights during a parade deserve to be called ‘animals’?

The essence of this asymmetry in political combat is that Democrats are free to rabble-rouse and demagogue their positions without penalty - indeed, often with great showers of media attention for doing so - while Republicans must rouse their constituents only obliquely through proxies - religious faith, gun rights, opposition to gay marriage, and of course “No New Taxes”. Even then, we often hear pundits denounce the “Three G’s” - Gays, Guns and Gods - so even their proxies are derided.

But this leads to dumb policies - or at least failure to enact sensible policies. We can’t have sensible gun laws, because Republicans have to prove that they sympathize with white-Americans’ anxiety over the baneful impacts of minorities on their neighborhoods not by addressing that issue directly but by supporting unrestricted gun rights. Gay marriage is stupid - but the real problem is the insidious “Diversity” mentality that so offends the white middle class, but instead of fighting that, Republicans must single out Gay marriage (and even that fight is being rapidly lost). And Religion leads to unnecessary constitutional battles, while it is just a proxy of course for the desire of white Americans to keep America the way it is - not a banana republic, not a dysfunctional, balkanized economic zone, as it is on its way to becoming.

However, crimethink has affected its leftist supporters, too, who dare not mention their fears that depart from the hallowed script. For instance, Sailer notes how neither side in our nation of cowards can discuss gun control policy honestly:

Gun control in the later 20th Century was a long war between whites in less dense parts of the country and whites in more dense parts of the country. Rural whites, rationally, considered gun ownership to be a good form of self-defense in areas where police response times were slow, the chance of accidentally plugging a bystander were low, and they had practice with guns for hunting. (In contrast, look at how vulnerable unarmed rural people in gun controlled England are to urban criminals’ home invasions.)

Metropolitan whites, rationally, felt that the cops getting guns out of the hands of minorities was a better goal, but they didn’t have any acceptable way to express this in public, so their arguments were generally couched in terms of the pressing need to disarm those vicious white Republicans in the hinterlands before they kill us all (see Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine for the classic expression of this ludicrous, but highly respectable, view).

In New York City, capital of both liberalism for American and pragmatism for New Yorkers, gun control actually did work pretty well in the 1990s. Under Giuliani and the smart, effective Bratton, the NYPD put a huge number of young black men in jail for packing heat. There were complaints, but NYC voters haven’t elected the Democratic nominee mayor in the five elections since. But who even understands what happened in NYC? It’s hard to remember stuff if you aren’t allowed a vocabulary and syntax that helps you categorize What Just Happened.

Similarly, in “Women’s Rights Women,” I note how our society’s political taboos have made both parties’ platforms and rhetoric incoherent.

American political discourse after the Second World War has been hopelessly muddled, given that all sides have not been about to think, much less speak, honestly about political issues. The horror of the Nazis and of the Communists made several aspects of political discourse taboo, and taboos do not facilitate clarity or rationality in men’s thoughts. The Left has tried to pursue an egalitarian agenda while pretending that social democracy is compatible with liberalism and freedom. The Right has tried to uphold the foundations of society without squarely addressing the natural inequality of man, the necessary consequences of social authority, the tension between freedom and order, and the real influence of class, ethnicity, and religion in political life. The partisans in American politics rightly deride the other side’s illogic and inability to present coherent assessments and solutions, though they fail to see how their own side suffers the same, and precious few commentators realize why American political discourse remains so idiotic. It’s the taboos. The “mainstream” is intolerant of any “extreme” voice—that might actually make sense and break through the fog of self imposed blindness.

The result is Fox News style stupidity, obfuscation, and muddied waters instead of clear principles. Sailer continues:

The problem is that when your enemies control the vocabulary of public discourse, it’s hard to maintain a sophisticated private understanding of what is going on. Thus, the GOP lacks a brain trust of realists who determine strategy. It’s fun to assume that, like in the Big Reveals at the end of 1984 and Brave New World, that there is an Inner Party of cold-eyed realists who understand all, but there’s negligible evidence for this.

For example, here are a number of high life priorities for vast numbers of Republican-leaning, conservative-minded voters:

—They want to be able to continue to live in their suburban communities where they’ve put down roots without being driven by demographic change to the exurbs.

—They want to be able to send all their children to the local public school, which will be culturally dominated by the children of people like themselves.

—They want their children to be able to get into State U.

Is this too much to ask?

But, what would happen to a conservative politician who outlined these goals and endorsed policies for achieving them?

Instead, we get “conservative” politicians advocating crackpot radical ideas because they aren’t supposed to advocate for what their constituents really want.

I do not agree that Republican politicians pursue “crackpot radical ideas.” Recent, highly publicized Republican concerns include homosexual “marriage,” abortion, the federal takeover of healthcare, profligate spending and the consequent debt, money printing that weakens our currency, public sector unions, illegal immigration, and the perennial complaint about the growth of the managerial, regulatory state. Where are the “crackpot radical ideas”? The problem with Republicans (when they sincerely disagree with leftist policies) is that they do not appear to have a clear understanding of conservative principles by which to oppose the enemy—whom they do not even recognize as such.

Posted by Joseph on Thursday, March 15, Anno Domini 2012
Anthropology • Politics • (0) Comments • Permalink

Thursday, March 8, A.D. 2012

A Dollop of Good Sense

I have lessened my postings during lent to two a week instead of three. As such, I have been amassing a collection of articles to discuss, and the expanding list of links in my Firefox bookmarks has triggered some O.C.D. anxiety. So, I present you the posts without substantive commentary. The following are posts from View from the Right and The Orthosphere that I recommend.

“Replying to Richard Lynn’s argument that higher-IQ people are atheists” by Auster on View from the Right.

“Romney’s threatening whiteness” on View from the Right, wherein Auster discusses Lee Siebel’s “What’s Race Got to Do with It?” By the way, Siebel’s article was rather fancied by our new correspondent from the netherworld, Grünald.

“Only a mass apostasy from liberalism can save us” by Kristor on View from the Right.

“Are whites brain-dead—or toiling under the reign of fear?” by Auster on View from the Right. I note with interest how liberalism’s reign varies among different cultural (and likely class) backgrounds. It makes me appreciate having been born and bred in Cincinnati, where white guilt is noticeably lacking in a great portion of the population.

“Why whites allow blacks to get away with the racial double standard” on View from the Right, where Auster suggests how “right-liberal” whites who believe in a color blind society should respond to racially conscious tribal affirmations like the “African-Americans for Obama” campaign:

This is completely unacceptable. The rule that we all subscribed to coming out of the Civil Rights movement was that Americans must practice race-blindness and avoid race-conscious speech and behavior, at least in the public square. Whites have followed this rule religiously: they never speak about the collective interests of whites or make negative generalizations about people of other races. And when an occasional white person breaks that rule, he is instantly fired or otherwise ostracized. Yet blacks openly speak about the collective interests of blacks, and collectively blame whites for blacks’ problems. Blacks such as Cornel West address each other as “brother” in public settings where there are both whites and blacks, thus using an in-group identifier of a type that is totally forbidden to whites. Blacks have formed innumerable black-only professional organizations, which whites wouldn’t dream of doing. The government has created “African-American History Month,” and a vast system of special group recognition of blacks as blacks. And now President Obama forms a race-conscious black political organization to help in his election. And he does this, even while piously declaring that he supports an America where we “all play by the same rules”! And, by the way, that “we all play by the same rules” America is an America where (according to the Weekly Standard) blacks are admitted into elite colleges with SAT scores a standard deviation lower than those of whites and Asians.

Blacks cannot have it both ways: they cannot demand that whites be race-blind and race-neutral, while blacks continue to be aggressively race-conscious themselves and gain massive favors and privileges in this society by a race-conscious, pro-black double standard. Since blacks (along with their elite liberal facilitators) do not feel themselves bound by the race-blindness rule, then whites should no longer bound by it either.

“Streep looking like an empress” on View from the Right, where Auster writes of his admiration for Streep’s unmodern basking in pride after winning her Oscar. In an interesting tangent, Auster notes:

The demeanor and personality of people, both well known and not, are expressions of our culture, our way of being. Never to remark on these things—and mainstream conservatives virtually never remark on them—is to make oneself blind to the reality in which we live. That reality does not just consist in facts, principles, political positions, and statistics. It consists of qualities. Contemporary people are blind and indifferent to qualities. And maybe the reason they are indifferent to qualities, is that qualities cannot be equalized. They cannot be technically and rationally arranged. The modern mind says it’s best to deal only with that which can be technically and rationally managed, and to ignore everything else.

Here’s an example of this that I was discussing with an intelligent liberal acquaintance the other day. I said to him that it seemed to me that even as recording and playing technology is advancing by leaps and bounds, the actual quality of sound we hear is much worse, for example, iTunes. Confirming my subjective impression, he replied that iTunes only contain 60 percent of the sound data contained in CDs (and for course CD’s contain far less of the original sound than vinyl recordings). Further, he said, no one cares. No one is bothered by or even notices the poor sound quality of iTunes. People are so excited and satisfied by the technical aspects of iTunes—being able to have so many recordings in a portable format wherever you go, and so on—that the actual quality of the music they are hearing doesn’t matter to them.

“Credo: Before all Worlds” on The Orthosphere in which Kristor ponders eternity.

“The Good, the Real, & the Fake Economy” on The Orthosphere where Kristor examines the waste of regulatory regimes and offers a simple but powerful critique of libertarianism. Moreover, Kristor provides an excellent test for any public policy:

Where there is in respect to the finer points of policy any doubt remaining, a simple thought experiment can quickly tell us whether a given option ought to be ruled out. All we need to do is ask ourselves, as between two otherwise completely similar societies, and holding all other things equal, if one of them allows the behavior in question while the other does not, which of them will prevail. Such questions generally answer themselves.

Notice that the question is not, what policy would be nicer or more fair, but what policy would be prudent – would, i.e., lead to the prosperity and prevalent success of society against its competitors, and vis-à-vis the challenges posed by the natural environment. Such questions of policy confront any form of government. The issue, then, is not whether legislative authority ought to be, or is optimally, vested in a monarch, an oligarchy, or a Parliament, or whatever; for any such authority would have to make the same decisions about policy. When we ask what form government should take, we should understand ourselves as asking which form of government would be most likely to make prudent policy – i.e., policy that leads us, individually and corporately, toward the Good.

To which I replied:

Your policy test is so obvious and self evident. Why is it never taken? Indeed, why is it so fastidiously ignored?

Has the success of the West made its people so stupid about reality? Just as trust fund babies need not develop virtue because their inherited money shields them from the consequences of their poor choices, our society’s wealth, bequeathed to us by our ancestors, has blinded us to necessity.

We are spoilt children of woe.

“Liberals’ new/old god: Moloch” on View from the Right where Auster considers the evil that surrounds us.

“Is it really true that feminists think pregnancy is an injustice to women from which society must rescue them?” by Auster on View from the Right with a link to the invaluable Mark Richardson of Oz Conservative: “Anna Smajdor: pregnancy is unjust.” Children of woe, indeed!

Posted by Joseph on Thursday, March 8, Anno Domini 2012
Anthropology • Ethics • Metaphysics • Politics • (0) Comments • Permalink

Monday, February 13, A.D. 2012

Nominalism, Nihilism, and the Will

For today’s entry, I wish to respond to a comment submitted by Tyler, a reader, on last Friday’s post, “Abortion as a Sacrament”:

As a someone who generally lines up with Right-libertarianism but has sympathy with neocon and Straussian thought, I appreciate the point you are making. I’m also an atheist (though I was a Protestant years ago as you may remember). So I guess my problem is that I don’t see how nihilism dictates worship of the will. If everything is meaningless, so is my will (and consistent nihilists like Alex Rosenberg would argue that the will is an illusion to begin with). From a godless viewpoint parts of your reactionary philosophy could be defended.

But my real question for you is how do you truly avoid worshipping the will? You are exercising your will by writing about your philosophy—if enough people come to agree with you, and your ideal society came to be, it would be an act of human will. The restrictions on human will that you like would come into being through human will, would they not?

I do not deny the existence of the will or that it has a proper place in human life, though I admit that I do not understand the faculty. My friend Andrew argues that there was no fixed understanding of the will as a special faculty before Augustine. If you look at ancient psychology, the consensus seems to be that the soul is a composite of different forces. Consider the numerous images of the soul in the Platonic corpus or the rational, animal, and vegetative parts of the soul in Aristotle’s De Anima. There are distinctions between voluntary and involuntary actions in the context of ethical discussions, but the driving force in the soul behind a man’s voluntary actions appears simply to be the strongest part of his particular soul. The good man’s reason leads him; his inner man rules the lions and the beasts of his thumotic and appetitive drives. The virtuous man’s practical reason determines his course of action. Hence, the Socratic tradition and its descendants stress the importance of moral education and the habitual exercise of virtuous deeds in order to shape the soul so that the rational element grows strong in its command over the irrational elements.

With Augustine, however, we get a faculty that appears to be the desk on which the buck of volition stops. For the Hellenic tradition makes it difficult to see men as ultimately responsible for their actions. Virtue is largely the result of being well reared. Yet, we might wonder how we can justly blame a man for his own upbringing that corrupted him and set him on a wayward path. Political necessity requires judgment and punishment, but such penalties are more practical in character; they make no claims on the ultimate origin of good or bad behavior. By contrast, Augustine the Christian worries about the divine justice in the judgment and punishment of a higher court. Augustine’s attempts to address that problem set the stage for the Western debate on the will, from De libero arbitrio to his later anti-Pelagian writings, which inspired Calvin’s predestination doctrines a millennium afterward.

I have no settled opinion on the matter. Last year at this time, frequent View from the Right commentator Kristor and I had an exchange that resulted in several posts where I stated my perplexity and my commitments regarding the will, mainly in the context of the problem of evil. I find it difficult to understand anything undetermined. The world that we witness is one of intelligible causality, and it is bizarre to think of the will as free. Yet, we have the experience of a faculty that suggests uncaused action. It is therefore understandable that Descartes and other moderns find the imago dei in the will, which seems a fitting image for the uncaused cause. Perhaps, Kant’s distinction of the noumenal from the phenomenal realm offers the best way possible to approach the mystery of the will.

The point of my last post stands regardless of our precise understanding of the will—namely, that the reduction of reality to the will is the wicked seed from which modern madness has grown. I suggest that the previous philosophical tradition is the correct one, where volition, however we conceive of its exercise, occurs in a world that has meaning apart from the will . . . and where will finds its appropriate exercise in conformity to our knowledge of the good. I proposed that modern confusion resulted from a bad turn in late medieval theology. Nominalism—the rejection of formal reality beyond a tool of human thought—was championed by religious men who thought that essences restricted the dominion of God. Their concern has its roots in a prior theological mistake that separates God’s will from God’s knowledge. For only by introducing such divisions in God may one conclude that essences threaten divine omnipotence. Yet, it is perverse to separate God’s will from his knowledge and his goodness. Though we do not know God’s essence, the divisions in being and in the faculties of our soul that relate to being do not apply to God, where the transcendentals exist in a unity, or at least in a state that transcends our understanding of unity. For us, truth and goodness—being as known and being as desired—remain distinct. Moreover, our faculties that deal with truth and goodness—our intellect and our will (however it is understood)—are distinct from each other and from their objects. Our divisions do not apply to God. There is no divine will separate from divine knowledge or divine goodness or divine love or divine power. The cruder Mohammedans and Calvinists err when they consider essences or an eternal standard of goodness an impediment to God’s omnipotence. For they make God into a divided being like us rather than the source of all being.

Historically, this theological error corrupted natural and moral philosophy, as well. Reality was reduced to will. Nominalism ultimately undermines all knowledge save the brute, irreducibly felt presence of the self. A brilliant and decent man like Descartes may recover enough ground to reconstitute some edifice of knowledge after having wrecked our cognitive abilities to understand the world as intelligible, but the worms of this reductionism would not rest. Yet, the slide toward more reductionism was not justified. Take Hume, for instance, who by all accounts was an intelligent and observant fellow. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, the Scotsman fails to account for our knowledge of “mathematical facts,” and his nominalist epistemology cannot explain how our minds associate “similar” ideas without admitting the metaphysical system that he wishes to reject. Even with a sincere philosopher like Hume, obstacles and snags to his project are curiously overlooked and forgotten. Likewise, the long march of Western philosophy from the love of wisdom to the dejection of nihilism is accompanied by thousands of such moments wherein men of genius continue to build their castles upon clouds while ignoring foundational problems that just happened not to be their problems.

“All reality is simply the stage upon which the self wills to act.” “But, Herr Doktor, are you proposing solipsism?” “No, not at all, for you are another self” “But we share the same stage?” “Indeed!” “But how does your self recognize my self as distinct from your self and from the world that it evidently creates?” “It is in the nature of the self’s free positing of itself to recognize the free self positing of other selves.” “But if the self can detect independent selves and is aware of the nature of these selves, at least in this respect, why can’t we affirm that we might understand the nature of the world in which the selves meet? After all, the world is the context of the self, and a shared world between multiple selves seems more independent than a projection of the selves.” “Achtung! You risk caving to the transcendent temptation! Don’t you realize that we abandoned all that superstitious, unfounded medievalism centuries ago? After all, it’s 1804!”

Such is not really that much of an exaggeration. Instead of picking on German idealism, we could consider any modern philosophical current where its claims about the limitations of knowledge undermine its own philosophical endeavor. See “The Necessity of Knowledge” for a fuller treatment of this story. Ockham’s parsimony has resulted in systems so niggardly that they cannot afford the mental resources to see the world as it is or even as they dare argue it to be. They make lavish claims about the world like the prodigal son, but they have rejected traditional approaches to the world that affirm man’s ability to know and the world’s ability to be known just as that self exiled youth rejected the household and ways of his father. In this, they just do not notice their ideas’ inadequacy because their attention is turned to their pet questions. I suspect that my fellow Cincinnatian Thomas Kuhn described intellectual labors within world views correctly. Though his concern was natural philosophy rather than metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, I think that the same human tendency prevails in all disciplines. Men often see only what interests them; they ignore or disregard tangential matters that do not relate to their current obsession.

What has concerned Western man for centuries has been power. Interest in nature for reasons other than mastery has been a minority position for ages. Knowledge of formal causes would not help us build more effective rockets or washing machines. Such knowledge might even cause us great inconvenience; it is a costly enterprise to consider natural ends. Just dealing with Kantian liberals and their moral hangups with autonomous wills really takes its toll on the bottom line. Do we really want to open up Aristotle’s long buried box?

Nominalism thus prevails not due to its rational superiority but because it facilitates increasing human power and because nominalists have failed to ask fundamental philosophical questions for the past seven hundred years. Ask a materialist basic metaphysical questions about matter, about the structure of an atom, about the identity of atomic structures, and you will bore him, anger him, or convert him. With apologies to Cardinal Newman—to be deep in metaphysics is to cease to be a nominalist.

Our reduction of all reality to the will, which is the consequence of nominalistic reasoning whereby our knowledge of the world continually diminishes as we rob ourselves of the ability to look at the world with our full intellectual faculties, eventually leads to chaos. I hold that our political disorder has its origins in the misplaced supremacy of the will, which has resulted in an endless rebellion against authority of any kind, whether ancestral, natural, or divine. If there is no natural value—no true hierarchy of goods—then everything is arbitrary. Everything becomes a projection of the will, and authority becomes simply an opponent in the struggle of wills. Yet, for what do these wills struggle if nothing else can be known—if nothing else matters? It is an absurdity that leads men to misology and nihilism. As Tyler notes in his comment, true nihilism entails the rejection of the will itself, but that rejection can only be theoretical. If a man lives, he necessarily affirms his will’s existence (however the will is conceived) by undertaking any act. So, having rejected God and reason, modernity becomes the idolatry of the will, disconnected from other aspects of reality that impinge upon boundless freedom. We might call modernity’s intellectual destination “dishonest nihilism”—an inconsistent rejection of being.

Andrew suggests that modern thought consists chiefly of philosophers with daddy issues who assume that no one ever had insight until them—a sort of adolescent intellectualism that refuses to grow up. When such spiritual immaturity informs—or fails to inform—political life, we get modern politics, wherein the most rebellious of the rebels (and all modern men are rebels) rejoice in their Satanic rejection of good. Accordingly, Lawrence Auster of View from the Right often calls leftism the political expression of evil:

. . . because people become immoral and unworthy of love, people stop caring for each other. And since, as I’ve often said, leftism is the political expression of evil,—more particularly, since leftism is the political expression of the rebellion against God and goodness of which Jesus speaks—under leftism people become increasingly unlovable and turn coldly away from each other. The forces of cohesion that hold a society together, die.

What is leftism? The deliberate destruction of the forces of cohesion—namely, goodness and love—that hold human society together.

It is not by coincidence that the Anton LaVey and his band of liberals, hedonists, and Nietzscheans chose to honor evil when they founded the “Church of Satan” in the 1960’s—that decade of tacky rebellion. For Satan is the ultimate rebel. Two of their “Pentagonal Revisionism” objectives are:

4. Development and production of artificial human companions—The forbidden industry. An economic “godsend” which will allow everyone “power” over someone else. Polite, sophisticated, technologically feasible slavery. And the most profitable industry since T.V. and the computer.

5. The opportunity for anyone to live within a total environment of his or her choice, with mandatory adherence to the aesthetic and behavioral standards of same—Privately owned, operated and controlled environments as an alternative to homogenized and polyglot ones. The freedom to insularize oneself within a social milieu of personal well-being. An opportunity to feel, see, and hear that which is most aesthetically pleasing, without interference from those who would pollute or detract from that option.

Ours is an age of autonomy, of empowerment, of freedom, of choice! At least, the self proclaimed Satanists understand the true nature of modernity. It is an exultation of the will divorced from any other considerations; it is praise of Adam’s sin wherein he placed his ego above God in his ranking of goods. Of course, these latter day Satanists eschew the traditional understanding of the demonic, at least at first. They worship themselves, not the devil, but the turn from God and toward nothingness is the same. I think of Screwtape’s seventh letter to Wormwood:

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

I wonder you should ask me whether it is essential to keep the patient in ignorance of your own existence. That question, at least for the present phase of the struggle, has been answered for us by the High Command. Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves. Of course this has not always been so. We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and sceptics. At least, not yet. I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, belief in us, (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. The “Life Force”, the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work—the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls “Forces” while denying the existence of “spirits”—then the end of the war will be in sight. But in the meantime we must obey our orders. I do not think you will have much difficulty in keeping the patient in the dark. The fact that “devils” are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.

Lewis well recognized that the forces of hell are cunning.

Tyler’s point about nihilism is a personally moving one for me. In my entry, “Criterial Argument for the Existence of God,” I copied an exchange wherein I admitted to having a “nihilistic temptation.” Since my first year in college, I have had a nagging suspicion that every absurd claim might be true, even though such fails the obvious retortion test and removes the possibility of further thought. Yet, it appears that our freedom for foolishness is so great that our minds are able to entertain, at least in a suggestive way, any ludicrous proposition. In response, Kristor notes:

As to the temptation of nihilism, I feel it, too. But is not this the same thing as to say simply that I feel temptation? Temptation to any sin, however trivial, is a temptation to some turn or other toward nothingness. Followed persistently, all sins lead ultimately to the outer darkness.

Nihilism offers no truth, of course. Yet, we are agents of truth. We are agents of action. We are. Nihilism is the purest Satanic stance, though it is a path that we cannot tread. We cannot live according to nothingness. We inevitably must affirm goods in order to live. Even the simple act of brushing one’s teeth or drinking a glass of water necessarily implies goods that we have claimed to exist. To be a human being is to act, and to act is to proclaim a moral dimension to the universe. Dionysius notes that even the demons, insofar as they exist, are good. Similarly, insofar as we remain men, we manifest the goodness of existence and, perhaps unwittingly and even, ironically, unwillingly, we thereby acknowledge the falsehood of nihilism in deed.

Update: Kristor adds the following comment on the original post:

The mere exercise of the will is not tantamount to the worship thereof, particularly when it is constrained by an intellectual knowledge of truth. By the same token, to say that the will ought to be subordinated to the intellect is not at all to denigrate the will, but only to coordinate it to its proper role in the economy of the person.

Rosenberg is quite right in saying that if there is no truth then the will is an illusion. If there is no truth, then “the will exists” is false. But then, so is “there is no truth.”

Posted by Joseph on Monday, February 13, Anno Domini 2012
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Friday, February 10, A.D. 2012

Abortion as a Sacrament

Last month before the March for Life, I was thinking about an idea that I have encountered in recent years that abortion is a sacrament for the Left. Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life notes that Ginette Paris published the book, The Sacrament of Abortion, in A.D. 1992, wherein she supports abortion as a pagan affirmation of life. I was surprised that the idea has its origin on the Left, but I should get used to the perversity of this world. Although the prophet Isaiah proclaims, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!,” one must not forget that the wicked delight in wickedness.

Upon reflection, however, I think that the Left’s position is remarkably consistent given human nature. Consider sacrifice and its place in human society. Sacrifice is pretty much a universal human phenomenon. Man gives up something dear to his gods. Crudely, this act is seen as a transaction wherein the sacrificer seeks to appease divine anger or curry divine favor. The more philosophical understanding is that by sacrifice man makes clear to himself and to everyone the proper order of being, where lesser goods are given up for greater ones. The act of sacrifice to the gods demonstrates vividly to the human soul and to the human community the appropriate hierarchy of the world; it is an impressive (as in impression making) act that proclaims the community’s ranking of values.

Among sacrifices, none is greater than offering human life, especially the life of a child who represents the very continued existence of the human community of which he is part. We find stories of child sacrifice repellant, and we are quick to condemn the practitioners of such acts as evil and demonic. However, from their point of view, they are offering their most precious good to the divine. In the scripture, we read of the Moabite king:

And when the king of Moab saw that the battle was too sore for him, he took with him seven hundred men that drew sword, to break through unto the king of Edom; but they could not. Then he took his eldest son that should have reigned in his stead, and offered him for a burnt-offering upon the wall. And there came great wrath upon Israel; and they departed from him, and returned to their own land.

The king killed his son and successor to gain divine power. It is obvious from the story that he did not want to do this for its own sake. He did it to prevail in battle and to save his kingdom, and it appeared to have worked. We on the Abrahamic side of the story might conclude that his murdering his son would only have pleased demons, and the great wrath was not a divine force but a Satanic one. Nonetheless, from the Moabite point of view, offering one’s own child to the gods was the most powerful offering because it was the greatest sacrifice possible. What more can a loving father give than his own child? Child sacrifice, seen in this light, is the supreme act of submission.

We have this in our own heritage with Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac. Of course, the Lord saved Isaac at the last moment, but there can be no doubt that the test of Abraham demanded the most from him that God could ask. As Christians, we further see the extreme expression of sacrifice in the crucifixion of Christ, and I propose that the sacrifice on Golgotha is the archetype for all sacrifice. Every sacrifice, whether burnt, blood, or living, of fruits, beasts, or human beings, of enemies, friends, or children, is an imperfect attempt to copy the sacrifice of Jesus the Christ—“the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world”—whose peculiar metaphysical status makes the crucifixion an eternally significant event that connects time and space to that which is beyond being. Consider, for instance, how the author of the letter to the Hebrews contrasts the temple cult to the sacrifice of Christ.

What, then, does this talk of child sacrifice have to do with abortion?

I believe that the positions and goals of the “Left” are the logical consequences of modernity. By that, I mean that the shift in world views that occurred in the late medieval period and Renaissance has been playing itself out over the past seven centuries, and the “cutting edge” of this development is, unsurprisingly, the “progressive” Left. The end of the Middle Ages saw the rise of nominalism—a philosophical doctrine that denies that essences exist in the world. The Franciscans who created this theory did so from a certain kind of piety, thinking that formal ontological realities limited the power of God. They thus conceived God as an omnipotent and unrestricted will, disconnected from and superior to anything known and, therefore, to knowing. This fundamental change in thinking about God revolutionized everything else, including the West’s understanding of nature and of mankind. Will has become the most important reality. Indeed, it is the only reality in quite a few philosophical currents. Having discarded the divine will, atheists keep only the human will, or perhaps will as such, and the will remains the touchstone for all other considerations. This change is the origin of all modern philosophical movements, almost all of which deify the will and discard any restraint upon the will. As with the original nominalists’ theology, the elevation of will corresponds to a diminution of truth. For truth is a restriction upon will, and the glorification of will necessarily accompanies a demotion of the intellect. For if we admit that there is reality apart from will, then the will’s freedom and scope become limited as there would be truths independent of the will. In summary, modernity is fundamentally an idolatry of the will.

I do not know if we should blame this aberration on the medieval nominalists or on Augustine who ensnared the West with the will’s tangle, but I do think that the reduction of reality to the will underlies all modern madness from the Cartesian mastery of nature to liberalism to utilitarianism to nihilism to Marxism to fascism to feminism to postmodernism to all the insane -isms that afflict men’s minds. Contemporary political thinking remains a prisoner in these fetters.

One obvious problem when everything is reduced to will is how we manage conflicting wills. One possibility is the Darwinian world where the stronger overcome the weaker. Think of Nietzsche’s will to power and the struggle of wills that we call life. Then, there are the ways of liberalism, where society attempts to maximize the ability of each will to exercise its power. Classical liberals seek to manage such conflicts loosely by instituting general rules of fairness, whereas egalitarian liberals want to engineer a society wherein each will has an equal ability to manifest its power. For why should one will be considered more important than another? If will is the fundamental reality, then everything else such as talent, intelligence, fortune, and discipline are irrelevant in discussions of justice. A just world is one of equal outcomes that allow equal opportunities to exercise power. Biology, consequences of decisions, and considerations of social stability cannot have any standing in this court of justice; for they are external to will and the Left is therefore uncomfortable with them. Nature must be reconstructed to agree with our choices, not the other way around. Something is willed; it therefore must be.

Therein, we see how abortion is a sacrament. For one sacrifices his children to his highest god, and there is no higher authority or power in the modern world than the individual will. Abortion is our society’s form of child sacrifice where babies are killed on the altar of the ego. There is no higher authority than the will; there is no greater good than the will’s current object. Abortion is simply a powerful manifestation of this belief. It is an affirmation of the superiority of the will over instinct, tradition, morality, and nature. The sacrificing priests of old both represented and taught the community through their sacrifices, and contemporary women and abortionists do the same in our society. Hear, all ye nations, the will is most supreme. Choice is sacred.

Update: This topic continues in “Nominalism, Nihilism, and the Will.”

Posted by Joseph on Friday, February 10, Anno Domini 2012
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Monday, February 6, A.D. 2012

Priorités Noires

Last week, George Michalopulos posted a lament over the Episcopal Assembly in America: “Another Missed Opportunity by the Episcopal (Non) Assembly.” I commented so:

Is it really true that the health care plan for the OCA’s employees covers elective abortion? How is that possible? Were the folks involved in the benefits selection disinterested in such matters or willfully supportive of the culture of death? This is yet another instance that shows how much further advanced the Latins are when it comes to engaging a post-Christian culture in practical ways.

Though tangential to the point of this post, I want to address the following statement:

This means that blacks, who gave 96% of their votes to Obama made a concerted effort to vote in landslide proportions the other way for a traditionally conservative proposition. This is a staggering consideration. Besides showing surprising political sophistication among African-Americans, it gives the lie to the thesis that liberal voters are blase when it comes to matters of cultural import.

I think that these words manage to be naive and condescending at the same time (unintentionally, of course). The “surprising political sophistication” of black Americans? “Why, George, bless my soul, Old Jesse’s over there reciting the Pledge of Allegiance! Isn’t that precious?”

Moreover, how is it a mark of political sophistication to disagree with a radical social platform of your chosen team but still to remain on the team because your support assures you many unearned goodies? While there are blacks on the “New Left” who go along with the sexual revolution and all that it entails, I do not think that black preachers often extol the splendors of diversity of sexual identity, lesbian literary criticism, or the dogmas of PETA. Rather, the Left has successfully recruited the vast majority of American blacks to support a racialized version of Marx, where ethnicity has supplaced class based on labor. It is the Old Left in blackface — Labor without the labor. Johnny-come-lately conservatives, like Glenn Beck, for example, fail to understand how leftist black Americans are. Conservatives fret over their “intolerable whiteness,” worrying that such makes them racist, whereas the truth is that proportionally few blacks hold conservative principles. Tea Parties and Republican conventions are overwhelmingly white because American whites are the only ethnic group to support traditional American notions of the state’s role in our lives, justice, social order, and the like.

The economic leftism of American blacks does not make them the typical San Francisco voters of Nancy Pelosi’s district. Black leaders hobnob with the other constituents of the Democratic coalition from necessity. They tolerate the glorification of sodomy and feminism in order to grease the rails of the statist gravy train. And they do so in good conscience, having bought into the racial Marxist explanation of blacks’ lower class status in America. If only Whitey did not keep them down, they would be doing fine in the Land of Milk and Honey. So, while it might be unpleasant to mobilize politically in arms with NAMBLA sympathizers, it is what one has to do for his “community.” Ethnic interests almost always trump other principles in normal human affairs. Yet, when an opportunity comes along where one can vote his disagreement, as in referenda, he does so. Yet, at the end of the day when it comes to whom average American black Mr. Jones puts in power, he remembers who butters his bread. That is what Democrats mean when they say that people vote their economic interests. It means that they support government managed theft as long as they are the recipients of that transaction. You know, that “social justice” beloved of the Left that is neither social nor just.

Men keep many goals. Human life involves ranking such goals as we limited beings must prioritize. Wisdom involves conforming those value choices to the true hierarchy of being.

Posted by Joseph on Monday, February 6, Anno Domini 2012
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Monday, January 30, A.D. 2012

Illustration of the Unprincipled Exception

Last week, Auster revisted an old post where he addressed the unprincipled exceptions of the Left: “The unprincipled exception as dramatized in Atlas Shrugged” Auster begins by summarizing the unprincipled exception, which he frequently mentions as it is necessarily common in leftist policies:

Since liberalism contradicts the nature of reality, it must lead to the death of society if its principles are consistently followed. Therefore a liberal society, in order to continue functioning and surviving, must make lots of exceptions to liberal principles. But since liberal society prohibits all non-liberal principles, these exceptions, upon which the very existence of the society depends, have no principle to back them up. Thus the only way a member of liberal society can slow its march to destruction is through means that to him must seem unprincipled. Liberal society remains viable only insofar as unprincipled exceptions prevent it from consistently following its own principles; and it only seems viable to its members insofar as they employ unprincipled exceptions to disguise from themselves its true nature and inevitable end.

Auster has compiled a list of articles that deal with this issue, “The unprincipled exception: a key to understanding liberalism.”

I find it perplexing, though, that so few people wake from their contradictions. It is the same mystery as to why men remain in the cave in The Republic. Why did the Athenians allow Socrates to be sentenced to death? Why did the Jews choose Barabbas over Jesus? The stupidity, wickedness, and cowardice of the herd are evident in most places at most times. Such is the lot of fallen man. Happily, though, what I call existential logic sparks a discomfort in some people, which results in a journey that leads them out of darkness and into the light.

Posted by Joseph on Monday, January 30, Anno Domini 2012
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Wednesday, January 25, A.D. 2012

Thirty-ninth March

On Monday, I attended the thirty-ninth March for Life. It is strange to think that I have gone to about half of the Marches for Life in history. I last was not able to go fifteen years ago because I was in Europe at the time. As such, I have a good understanding of how the march has evolved. One strikingly visible change has been the numbers, appearance, and age of men and women in the consecrated life at the march. Roman Catholics have always been the overwhelmingly dominant group at the march, and they continue to be so. However, their priests, friars, sisters, monks, and nuns are more numerous every year. Their garb has become much more traditional, reflecting the return to traditional practices that is so evident in Roman Catholicism. When I arrived at the pre-march rally, I could not find the Orthodox group at first, and I moved around the Mall trying to spot them. The proliferation of cassock wearing Roman priests complicated my efforts. I finally got so tired of scanning such groupings of men that I approached some Latin priests and said, “I’m glad that you guys are wearing cassocks, again, but it makes my life harder when I’m trying to find the Orthodox group.” The priests had a jolly laugh and then pointed me in the right direction to find the group.

The religious folks are also getting younger. I told my friend Andrew that I saw hundreds of pretty young nuns on Monday and such made me very happy. Not in a weird, Catholic school girl uniform fetish sort of way, mind you! Rather, youth is vibrant and attractive, and I find the sacrifice of youth and beauty to the consecrated life particularly beautiful. The practice is clearly dysgenic, which is unfortunate, but sacrifices are necessarily important losses. I also talked to a group of handsome, masculine, well groomed Jesuits about the state of affairs in that long suffering order so dear to my heart, and I have further confidence that the younger Jesuits will end that particular community’s recent rebellion. The new generation holds much promise.

Furthermore, these folks are, in fundy terms, “on fire for the Lord,” and they are actively recruiting. At the exhibit hall for the March for Life, religious women were passing out vocations material specific to men and women. One order had a brochure labeled “Joseph” and another labeled “Mary,” each well suited to reaching their targeted demographic. For instance, the men’s material uses very martial language. One of the responses to “Why devote yourself to God in religious life?” is “To bolster the ranks of the Church Militant in choosing for your tour of duty during this short life to fight on the front lines for God and His Church.” Amen! This is how to recruit strong, energetic young men to the consecrated life! I am happy that the Latins have finally rediscovered their testicular fortitude after a long exile in the estrogenized desert.

As for the Orthodoxy community, I was pleased by Metropolitan Jonah’s address. When the introducer stressed that the invocation would be a historic first joint witness and prayer of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox bishops at the March for Life, I was alarmed, thinking that the Metropolitan had gone rogue and was about to cause the heads of all the Churches’ external relations departments simultaneously to explode around the world. Yet, the bishops were very clever. They stressed that they were having a joint prayer, but Metroplitan Jonah delivered it with Timothy Cardinal-elect Dolan standing next to him. That way, unity was shown without causing scandal to the Orthodox, who are wary of joint prayers. After the prayer, the two men hugged and shared the kiss of peace. It was satisfying to see the Latin and Orthodox bishops exercise such diplomatic intelligence. Harmless as doves and wise as serpents! Perhaps, the Metropolitan’s recent political turmoil has taught him to be shrewd.

The Orthodox marching, group, however, continued to be dysfunctional. On George Michalopulos’ site, I saw that a deacon had mentioned the march. I responded thus:

Father, if you have any influence on the group, could you please remind the banner carriers that they are always negligent of the crowd behind them? For years, I have thought about writing a letter, but I don’t know to whom I should send it. I have attended the march pretty much every year since I was a child, and I have marched with the Orthodox group most years over the past decade. However, for the past five years or so, the banner carriers—probably due to their being feisty seminarians—behave as though they are not leading a crowd of people through a gigantic mass of folks. They always leave most of the group behind, especially at the beginning. This year was no different, but thankfully they stopped at the corner on Constitution because they left the bishops! Maybe that was their plan for regrouping, but they need to wait every year for the group to collect.

I understand that they want to get to First Street to have time for the service, but there was plenty of time. Also, if they are worried of the Capitol Police kicking them off the corner as has happened before, why don’t they move to the plaza across from the Supreme Court? I know that we are there for a cause, but we are also quite a visible spectacle to thousands of positively disposed people who have only heard of Orthodoxy. Every year, I witness dozens of interested folks, mostly enthusiastic Latins, engage the group with questions and encouraging words. We would increase our visibility near the Supreme Court and allow for more onlookers to join us in prayer since it is the end of the marching route there.

This may not be able to be helped, but stationing the group far from the rally (like this year) keeps us from being able to hear the rally (and the Metropolitan’s prayer) and makes us largely invisible to the marchers and to the Orthodox in the crowd who are looking for us. I searched for the group for at least an hour in that muddy mess before I located them on Seventh Street far from the rally. On the way, I came across several disparate groups of Orthodox Christians, including nuns from All Saints Greek Orthodox Monastery on Long Island, who would have otherwise marched with us had the group been present and visible at the rally.

I know that organization is largely alien to our ethos, but we can do better. So, if you know how to rectify the situation, it would be highly appreciated.

Maybe, the deacon can forward such concerns to someone who can improve the group’s planning.

For the past four years, I have been able to play tour guide a bit for my brother’s high school group before and after the march. This year, the boys arrived in Washington a day early, which allowed them to see more of the city. If you take such a long bus trip, you ought to spend more time in the capital than simply the hours of the march. Plus, getting a decent rest in a bed makes the day of the march better in every way. I met the group at Union Station after the divine liturgy, which worked well since the group attended mass at the basilica in the morning. From there, I showed them some Capitol Hill sites on the way to the National Mall. We had the chance to visit many museums and monuments until I returned the very exhausted group to their hotel that night. Unfortunately, I only saw the group for a minute while they were passing the Orthodox memorial service at the end of the march, but I hope that their Monday went well.

Among other observations, I must say that I prefer freezing temperatures to the rain. The rally was a mud pit, and umbrellas and crowds go poorly together. Still, I was surprised by the turnout. Every year, people say that the march is getting bigger, and that usually seems to be the case. I remember that the march in A.D. 2001 was particularly impressive, but I attribute that to the inauguration crowds’ participants’ double dipping. Moreover, folks back then anticipated some positive political change with Bush’s election, and such energy likely affected a numbers boost at the march. Nonetheless, recent years have seemed larger than before.

I was also pleased that the route was lengthened this year due to the Mall’s restoration project that forced the rally back to Ninth Street. The eastward creep of the march over the past decade has bothered me a lot, as I mentioned in recent years in “The March and the Media” and in “Thirty-eighth March.” I wish that they would return to the Ellipse.

Unlike the last few marches, I did manage to see a counter protester this year. After the march, as I walked to the Hyatt Regecy to see the exhibit hall, I passed one scruffy looking, thirty something man who was wearing two cardboard pieces like the Soldiers of Hearts in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland. The boards stated something about voting for “choice.”

I noticed a few signs that made me smile, but I cannot recall them now. I should have taken pictures. I did see a group of children with stuffed minion dolls (from Despicable Me) on which they had written, “Minions for Life.” That was cute. I also noticed a large banner held by Anglican converts to Rome that stated, “Thank you, Holy Father, for Anglicanorum Coetibus!” When I saw the Yoopers for Life sign, I had to ask the group if they had brought pasties for everyone. Sadly, they said that they had run out.

As always, my fellow Ohioans made a strong showing. The young priest who accompanied my brother’s high school group said that the Archdiocese of Cincinnati had 1,700 student tickets, with additional staff, clergy, and chaperone tickets, of the 20,000 total tickets. If we add 150 more for staff, that makes 1,850 of 20,000, or 9.25%. That is amazing. If we added the tickets for other Ohio cities, it is possible that a fifth or even a quarter of the participants were Ohioans. Yet, it confirms the anecdotal evidence of seeing so many Ohio groups so well represented at every year’s march. Midwesterners, in general, have a strong showing, along with groups from Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Maryland, and Virginia, as one would expect. Foreign delegations included Canadians, Germans, Italians, the French, Brazilians, Mexicans, and I believe Guyana, whose drum playing visitors I had never seen before.

In summary, the day went well despite the rain. I wish that every day in Sodom, there were so many righteous men in the city.

Posted by Joseph on Wednesday, January 25, Anno Domini 2012
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Monday, January 16, A.D. 2012

Saint Martin’s Day

For this holiest of days on our modern civic calendar, I recommend that you read Paul Gottfried’s “The Patron Saint of White Guilt” from Taki’s Magazine. After such edification, if you still hunger for a chance to indulge more piety, enjoy One STDV’s “Example of MLK as Deity,” inspired by Gottfried’s brief article.

One would think that such sanctimonious madness exists only on the political Left, but Leftism has colonized mainstream conservative institutions and minds. For example, Glenn Beck named Saint Martin of Sorrowful Memory as one of history’s four champions of peaceful revolution along with Moses, Jesus Christ, and Ghandi. Of course, Beck is an American and a Mormon, which means that his historical compass wavers after we go back more than two centuries. Still, I find it surprising that a prominent American “conservative” media figure like Beck includes Ghandi and King among the most important men in any category that spans human history or that he reckons that Mose’s and Jesus’ accomplishments involve “peaceful revolution.”

Update: It appears that the unrepentant Right shares a mental morphic field at times. A day after posting my homage to Saint Martin, I read Richard Spencer’s “The God of White Dispossession,” which starts with, “On this, the holiest day of modern America’s liturgical calendar, we should revisit Samuel Francis’s writing on the significance of Martin Luther King Jr.” Later, Spencer also criticizes Glenn Beck, though more generally than my post does. I suppose that the Left’s worship of King and Beck’s unconsidered enthusiasm for him make them standard targets for conservative disgust. Moreover, I believe that Gottfried and Francis were friends. So, even our auctores were related.

Posted by Joseph on Monday, January 16, Anno Domini 2012
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