Letter to My Son: Old Movies and Books Help Inoculate You against Liberalism

My Son,

You may not like those old movies and books, but you need them. Why? Because old movies and books were made before liberalism took over.

The old moviemakers and authors were free to show normal human beings doing normal things. They were free to show life as it should be. They didn’t have to worry about being punished by social justice warriors, and they were not brainwashed by liberalism. Yes, some old movies and books get things wrong, but overall they are the best place to see how things should be. Contemporary liberalism has distorted and perverted our way of life.  If you want to see how life should be, the best place to look is old movies and books.

That’s why the liberals (if they have any brains) don’t want you to like old books and movies.

Incarnation & Transubstantiation are Formally Analogous

Transubstantiation stymies us in the same way, and for the same reason, as the Incarnation. In both cases, God takes embodiment in a finite creaturely vessel. The Logos takes the form of man and of bread (and likewise of Church, and Word – but tace re them for the nonce). These forms remain what they were. Jesus the man is still a man – Good News for us, since only qua man could he make strictly human reparation to God for the sins of Man, thus healing the cosmic wounds particularly inflicted by men – and the bread is still just as bready as ever – again, good, or we could not eat him, and so partake his Body and its sacrificial redemption of all our predicaments. The human nature is not driven out of the man by the divine nature, and the breadiness of the bread is not driven out by the divinity of it. On the contrary, they are each perfected. When God becomes man, a man – and, so, Man in general – becomes the God, so that men (can) become gods. Likewise, when God becomes bread, the bread becomes the supersubstantial Bread of Heaven: it becomes the God, who is the manna that feeds the angels, and the other members of God’s Body. Us.

We are what we eat, deo gracias.

In both cases, the soma remains soma; and, so, as soma, divine participant and influence in this world – a solid, as heavy as any stone, and so therefore scandalous to any who would pass by.

The true question is this: why should either Incarnation or Transubstantiation so scandalize us? Is it not only, merely, that these Incorporations of the divine into his creation are difficult for us to comprehend?

Nostalgie de la Boue, a Morning Meditation

I am sitting in a hotel room in Austin, Texas, looking across an urban canyon at the curtain wall of a high, buff-colored office building. The sun has yet to rise, so I can see into its empty offices; but my eye is especially drawn to what appear to be small conference rooms at the corners. I see little round tables, wire-frame chairs, and conference rooms stacked like soup cans, one above the other, right up the corner of the gargantuan hive.

Plato’s Cave

Plato’s allegory of the cave appears in Book VII of Plato’s most famous and longest dialog, The Republic. Plato’s dialogs frequently star Plato’s teacher Socrates as a character. The dialogs involved discussions and philosophical arguments between various characters, some of whom were based on real people. Plato particularly disliked the sophists who were professional rhetoricians and who seemed to care more about money and social success than truth. In fact, Plato accused them of teaching their students how to make the worse argument appear better – enabling their students to convict the innocent and set free the guilty.

The Gedanken Policy Test of Christianity

One reason you pick out and blame a scapegoat for the sins of the whole people is so that you can be sure you yourself are not among the number of the evil ones who pollute the City, and thus yourself in no danger of ostracism or banishment. This you can do without ever troubling with the beam in your own eye, provided you go along with the mob’s condemnation of the chosen scapegoat. It’s an easy “fix” for your own anxiety about your wickedness.

But it’s not a true fix; it doesn’t remove your inward knowledge of your own impurity, or your awareness that your impurity might be soon found out, so that you were then yourself ostracized. It doesn’t permanently salve your anxiety. All it does is ensure that you are not going to be singled out for punishment this time. It is a temporary reprieve, and no more: so that you remain as it were a condemned man, whose sentence of death has been deferred for one more day.

The Resurrection of the Body: A Simple Explanation for Children

Much of what follows is a literal transcription of a recent conversation with my four year old granddaughter.

Poppy walked out with his granddaughter and her little brother to play. There was a series of lawns, connected by grassy paths. On one lawn, his granddaughter spotted a tiny, perfectly camouflaged toad hiding in the sand. It was almost impossible to distinguish the toad from the surrounding sand.

She wanted to mess with the toad, but Poppy told her that was a bad idea, because to the tiny toad she seemed like a monster a hundred times bigger than the great fir tree just yonder seemed to us. The poor little toad was so scared of us, that if she just touched him with a blade of grass, he might be scared to death.

She left the toad in peace, even though that was very hard for her to do. Her little brother left him in peace, too.

Then, she found another tiny toad, hiding in just the same way as the first. She looked at it, but left it alone, even though she really wanted to pick it up and pet it. Her little brother left that toad alone, too.

Then, she found a dead toad out on the grass. It was not hiding in the sand. It was quite dried up. She and her brother squatted to look at it. So did Poppy. They poked it with a twig, because Poppy said that the toad could not feel bad about anything anymore.

She asked, “What’s the matter with it, Poppy?”

“It’s dead, sweetie.”

“Yeah. Why is it dead?”

Established Sacerdotal Hierarchy Controls for Competitive Holiness Spirals

Holiness spirals are not first a search for status, although once they have got going, they do result in an arms race to see who is holiest among the Pharisees, thus of the highest moral and political rank, and thus least suitable as a scapegoat.

They are, first, a search for the proper constraints of true holiness upon conduct. Men are Fallen, and live in a Fallen, corrupt world; and they know it. They want to get holy; they want desperately to get ritually pure. Until they can honestly feel that they have done so, they will feel terrific anxiety, and thrash about in their predicaments like a bear in a trap.

Trapped bears are very dangerous.

When there is no established sacerdotal hierarchy that can authoritatively define the unquestionable constraints of holiness, and then offer men a way to get back within those constraints when they have strayed beyond their pale – that can give them a way to know that they have reached safe harbor – then men are going to push and push toward holiness however they can discern it according to their own best lights, without let or correction, and without possibility of any satisfactory completion of the search (because a forecondition of success for any search is a clear definition of success – such as can be authoritatively furnished to the searcher only by an incontrovertible authority). Anyone who disagrees with the notions of those who find that as a result of their personal quest for holiness they themselves are of the holiest sort then becomes a legitimate scapegoat in their eyes, and so a social enemy. There is then mutual repudiation and scapegoating of adversarial sectarians; mutual excommunication; schism; and, with the ensuing conflict of irreconcilable cults, civil war either hot or cold.

Falling to Pieces:

In anticipation of the possible release of what may be an incendiary memorandum, it is timely for us to review the basic stages by which a political order falls to pieces. It does so through the stages of party politics, factional politics, conspiracies, and civil war (under which head I include revolution, rebellion, and secession).

The Right of Exit Does Not Entail the Right of Entry

Reactionaries worry that a patchwork of sovereign corporations that grant their subjects the right of ad libitum exit to the domains of other such corporations would eliminate the borders that bound nations and constrain immigrations of men devoted to other, foreign, and probably lesser cults – or, why would they have been interested in immigration to begin with? – and thus lead to the demolition of righteous, apt, prudent, ergo successful and prosperous nations or peoples.

It is a reasonable worry. It is the sort of thing that we ought to worry about. But we may dismiss it.

Living on Sufferance

“When he described the precarious and degraded state of the Osage tribe, diminished in number, broken in spirit, and almost living on sufferance in the land where they once figured so heroically, I could see his veins swell and his nostrils distend with indignation . . .”

Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies (1835).

Many years ago, I was introduced to a geography professor, professedly male, who had the appearance of an elderly lady dressed in a man’s three-piece suit.  He was not effeminate in the common meaning of that term, but the wrinkles on his face were curiously soft, the pitch of his voice strangely high, and the cut of his hair oddly feminine.  Except for the suit and the fact that everyone called him Peter, he might have been mistaken for a rather shy grandmother.