A hierarchy that is not consecrated and thus ordered in all its parts to the vision of the Good vouchsafed by the common cult is as likely to work good as is a broken clock to display the correct time. A profane institution is finally, and thus fundamentally, and thus thoroughly misdirected away from the proper mundane end of all human acts: the achievement, maintenance, repair and restoration of that proper harmony among and within things under and toward heaven, in virtue of which alone is there any health, prosperity, propagation, contentment, wisdom.
Economics
Increase of Subsidiarity Tends to Increase of Liberty
As each level of a subsidiaritan political hierarchy fobs off upon its subsidiaries every duty it possibly can, each level of the hierarchy will interfere with subsidiary systems less and less. The result should be a libertarian’s dream – and quite nice for sovereigns, too (indeed, optimally nice).
Thomas Sowell in “Intellectuals and Race”
Thomas Sowell in “Intellectuals and Race” has now been published by the Sydney Traditionalist Forum. I do no more, really, than summarize Sowell’s main arguments and conclusions. If you have read “Intellectuals and Race” this article can serve as a refresher regarding some of the main points. If you have not read “Intellectuals and Race,” the book is not simply a philosophical argument, but presents copious empirical evidence that the causes of problems that many black Americans face have been misdiagnosed and thus the offered solutions are also often misguided.
If the aim is to help actual concrete people, rather than to play ideological games and identity politics, this book should be regarded as a must read.
Truth versus the West
At least since Nietzsche, modern European pagans of the more reckless jejune sort have been wont to proclaim that Christianity gutted Europe of her original, chthonic, manly, distinctive culture. The process took millennia, they say, but it has now been pretty much completed. Europe has been unmanned by the pale Galilean who had already sapped Rome and the wider Hellenic world with his flaccid Oriental mysteries, and lies now prone before her Mohammedan conquerors.
It’s a silly conceit. For one thing, the West began her precipitous Modern decline at exactly the moment that her formerly deep and utterly preponderant Christian faith began to weaken and splinter – thanks in no small part to that madman, Nietzsche himself (and to a few other madmen, such as Voltaire). For another, if Christianity really did gut Europe of such a vigorous exuberant cult, then … that cult must have been rather weak after all, mutatis mutandis – and so, by its own lights, deserving of death.
The Summary of the Law is the Sine Qua Non of Society Per Se
The Summary of the Law is composed of two Great Commandments that both take the form “thou shalt:”
Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
Matthew 22:37-40
Notice then that in the Decalogue, there are only two commandments that are likewise prescriptive:
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. (Exodus 20:8)
Honour thy father and thy mother … (Exodus 20:12)
These four prescriptives are related. Those of Exodus are corollary elaborations of those given by Jesus as the foundation of all law. Thus:
- Love God, for he who is supreme deserves no less than your supreme loyalty; so, therefore: Keep holy and lively his Cult; preserve its doctrines and faithfully observe its observances, such as the sabbath, rituals, fasts and feasts, and so forth.
- Love your fellow as if he were a human being like you, or there’ll be hell to pay; so, therefore: Honor your parents; likewise ergo the things that they honor: keep and honor your kin, and your patrimony.
If you are not doing these things, you have no society. If you don’t agree about First Things, you’ll have a hell of a time reaching completely harmonious and pacific agreement about anything else, including how people ought to treat each other; and if you don’t agree about that, you won’t care about keeping a patrimonial tradition; so that you won’t have a perdurant culture, or therefore a robust and durable people. No cult, no culture; no culture, no nation.
Reversion to Tit for Tat
As the optimal strategy for iterated games, Tit for Tat long ago became the norm and basis of human social coordination. It is manifest in our sense of fair play, in our customs and laws, and in all our economic exchanges. Tit for Tat is then a strange attractor for human societies. They all tend toward it, homeostatically. The further you push a society away from Tit for Tat, the harder will it try to get back.
Prevent a people from responding to tats for a long, long time, and eventually they will snap. The frenzy of the explosive rush to restore equilibrium will manifest in a million tits for every tat. Those who had lately done well by tatting will find themselves all tits up.
It will be a bloody ugly rebound.
Supragenous Authority & the Subsidiaritan Feudal Stack of Sovereignties
The considerations of my recent post Authority Must Flow Down From On High have important implications for the subsidiaritan feudal stack of sovereign corporations. They go instantly to matters of legal form.
Playtime is Over
When you reduce selection pressure as the West has massively done since the Industrial Revolution, you get a lot more depravity (you get r instead of K), because the relative penalties to error and vice go way, way down. And vice versa: when you increase selection pressure, the relative rewards to virtue go way, way up, so you get lots more virtue.
We have no immediate prospect of an uptick in natural selection pressure, although the handwriting is on the wall. It’s out there (it always is).
But Trump is imposing artificial selection pressure (in part because he and his ilk can comprehend the writing in flame on the wall (to the depraved at their banquet, it is gobbledygook, nonsense, mere noise: mene, mene, tekel upharsin)). His basic message is simple: Playtime is over, no more pretend, everybody out of the pool, time to get dressed and back to work.
The liberals are going crazy because this strictly artificial – i.e., merely social, rather than biological – increase in selection pressure pushes the same neural and cognitive levers as would be triggered by a sharp uptick in natural selection pressure. It feels to them like a sort of death. They are terrified of death. Trump makes them aware of their death. Like death, he just doesn’t care about their whining (as much as they are used to). So they panic, and then they turn to defensive rage. It’s a tantrum.
Free Markets Are Costly; Who Should Pay for Them?
Markets are not free. They are the product of immense expenditures of land, labor, capital, and enterprise; for they cannot be maintained at any considerable scale except under conditions of good political order: laws, lawfulness, an efficient and just system for the administration of justice, the enforcement of agreements and the adjudication of disputes; safety and security (furnished by honest police and lethal warriors to deter piracy, crime, and plunder); reliable weights, measures, and media of exchange; complex financial arrangements (banking, brokering, insurance, and so forth); sophisticated transportation facilities (ports, highways, bridges, etc.); a prosperous pool of prospective customers; and the infrastructure to support all these functions (sewers, waste facilities, food, housing, and so on).
Markets do tend to form wherever people are gathered together, it is true, and no one needs to arrange for this to happen any more than languages need to be administered. But like languages, markets cannot flourish except at scale: below a certain number of participants, they wink out. And the achievement of that scale requires political order over a geographic region and a population large enough to form a profitable target market for sellers (whether foreign or domestic).
Political order is of course good for other things than markets. It is the forecondition of any civil prosperity, along any dimension: as, not just wealth, but health, sanity, sagacity, happiness, righteousness, holiness, fecundity, creativity. All these in turn feed back into the vigor and sanity of the political order, and its fitness to conditions. So they do likewise with markets, and vice versa.
Markets, in short, are expensive. Much is paid to facilitate them. Because they are not free in fact, they ought not to be available for free. They ought to be available only in exchange for payment. How ought those payments to be priced, and how collected?
Owned Government Would Tend to Lawfulness & Social Peace
Owned government would tend to good government. Stable, just law is a forecondition of prosperity, and thus of the sovereign’s revenues from his personal property in the state enterprise. So the prudent sovereign would not want his government to be capricious, or vicious. He wouldn’t want to run it as a racket. He wouldn’t try to rip off his customers, but rather do his best to give them great service.
To his subjects then would it be quite apparent that the laws their governors impose and execute are reasonable and just withal, fairly and properly enforced. They would not be unhappy with their lords, or chafe at their rule. That rule would therefore be legitimate; and the sovereign would enjoy the fealty of his subjects, and indeed their love. Their untroubled cooperation with him would follow.
