Superstition & Subscendence: An Essay in Honor of Tom Bertonneau

Bear with me here. I hardly know where I am going with this, although I feel I have caught the spoor of something Tom would find delightful – that he would join with me joyfully in this new hunt. I’m confused because all I have is that spoor, and my spirits are in a hurry and a muddle due to his too soon death. I miss my friend of many years – of too few! I am not yet sure how to do with the world that, henceforth, shall miss him.

Tom has been a valued colleague since we first encountered each other. We corresponded often – not often enough, alas – about our hopes and worries in respect to our work, much of it coordinate here. We sometimes asked each other for editorial advice upon that work. I could rely on Tom for sound counsel. I hardly know how I shall manage without his sagacity.

But I must. I bid you all help me in that project, in which we may hope we can all together proceed for many more years to come. That would be a fitting legacy of his penetrant honest cheerful mind.

I propose that this essay be an early installment in something like a festschrift for Tom. Let us all try to limn what it was that he taught us. Perhaps we might make a book out of it. Or maybe just something on the scale of an issue of Amazing Stories, circa 1935: the sort of thing that was an important source of grist for the mill of his wits. That would please him, perhaps above all things we might do to honor him.

Pray for Lydia McGrew

Philosopher and Biblical scholar Lydia McGrew, our longstanding friend and dauntless shieldmate in the culture wars since the VFR days, has just revealed over at What’s Wrong With the World that since a week after her Pfizer covid vaccination in April, she has been afflicted with a devastating but mysterious – and, not yet diagnosed – malady that causes her daily intense and more or less constant pain. It has interfered with sleep, eating, work, sitting, walking: everything. It acts like inflammation of nerves, but that has not yet been ascertained. Since she began documenting her symptoms, Lydia has learned of many hundreds of other such cases. Perhaps thousands.

Before she got the shot, she was, so far as she knew, perfectly healthy.

Lydia is hanging in there, and she is one tough gal, but I have to say that this sounds pretty bad. Lydia wrote me last evening to ask for my prayers. I agreed, of course, and asked if I could post this appeal. She said yes.

Please join me, therefore, in an earnest prayer for the health of Lydia McGrew. Or several hundred of them.

If you do not know of Lydia’s terrific work for our side in the present war, it would do you good to check it out. You won’t be able to read it all. She’s far more prolific than all of us here put together, and she’s been at it for longer. But it’s all worth reading. With Lawrence Auster, Jim Kalb, Bruce Charlton, and Zippy Catholic, Lydia has from early days in my own career as an online apologist and culture warrior been an important and beneficent influence upon me, and if you read her stuff I think it will be the same for you. I’m going to tag this post as an Apologetical Weapon, because that’s what Lydia is.

May God bless and keep his faithful servant, Lydia McGrew. May he bring her into all knowledge, restore her to health, and give her peace and rest in him, if not yet, then soon, and at last, and forever. Amen, amen.

The Ctrl-Alt-Del-Right

What is popularly called the Right these days is of course mostly just Right Liberalism; which is to say, Right Leftism. I.e., not Right at all. This had been known in the discourse of reaction since about 2002, when Lawrence Auster, Zippy, James Kalb, Moldbug, et alii, first began writing online.

The Right, period full stop, is not in fact Right. It is rather the “Right.” So have we seen in the last few years the rise of several other sorts of Right, that distinguish themselves from the “Right” with the same urgent animosity that true Communists display in distinguishing themselves from mere liberals and panty-waist Socialists and Social Democrats.

These sorts fall into four categories: the Alt-Right, the Ctrl-Right, the Del-Right, and the Ctrl-Alt-Del-Right. These sorts are all more truly of the Right. But only one of them is right, or therefore Right; so that it integrates, and indeed consolidates, all other sorts of Rightness.

Much has been written of the Alt-Right. The Alt-Right takes the deliverances of the Normal Narrative and turns them upside down. Viz., sexual realism, racial realism, national realism, cultural realism, and so forth, as against the Mass Indiscretion, blindness, and Failure to Notice that is so characteristic of those poor pathetic souls not yet liberated from the Normal Narrative.

Then there is the Del-Right: all the ilk of the anarcho-capitalists, the techno-futurists, the thoughtful realistic libertarians, and especially those souls who find their guts arrayed in horror and disgust against the Swamp, against the Deep State, against the Cathedral, against the Cabal, and so forth – against, that is to say, the Cult of Moloch and his babelarchy – who insist that the first and essential step to restoring social equilibrium and cultural health is to delete the political, cultural and especially bureaucratic accrustations of the last few centuries, at least.

Then again there is the Ctrl-Right, who would restore outwardly, and consecrate, the ancient royal and sacerdotal hierarchy that always anyway, somehow or other – nowadays mostly hidden, a corrupt oligarchy that dare not speak its name – administers social coordination.

Then at last there is the Ctrl-Alt-Del-Right. That’s us: reboot; all of the other sorts of more truly Right, integrated and so kicked up a notch or three.

NB that because the orthospherean Ctrl-Alt-Del-Right [man, that’s hard to type!] includes and subsumes the other sorts, it administers in the process some necessary corrections and adjustments of each, so that they all fit together coordinately and harmoniously.

An Eu Logion of Zippy Catholic

The Catholic, Christian and Traditionalist community were shocked and appalled to learn last week that their pillar, blogger Zippy Catholic, had been killed in a bicycle accident last Tuesday evening while riding on a country road.

We are still struggling to reconcile ourselves to this new world, in which Zippy no longer roams about skewering sloppy thought, and so enlightening all of us his readers, interlocutors and students.

It was a severe and devastating blow, completely unanticipated. Zippy was neither old, nor – so far as we knew – ill. So his death came out of left field. No one was prepared for it. He had, we all thought, several decades more of good, fruitful work in him, that all of us would have enjoyed, and that would have profited us all, and man, and the whole human project. We looked forward to that prospect, blithely, happily, as if we possessed it already. Now, it is ripped away from us. We find ourselves bereft, lost, bewildered.

And: we miss him. We want him here with us, still. God damn the evil circumstance that took him from us. And – and – God bless that taking, as proper (as it must have been, necessarily) under the purveyance of Omniscience.

Blessed be the Name of the Lord. Amen. Lord, bless and keep thy faithful servant Zippy Catholic, and make him soon fit to enter into the coruscating Light of thy Holy Presence. Help and heal all his wounds, correct all his defects, and complete him. All this I pray, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen, amen. Hallelujah, hallelujah, thanks be to God. Amen, amen.

The Circumstantial Injustice of Taxes on Property

One of the interesting things about being a Christian reactionary is that I keep discovering huge unsuspected remnants of my native modernism by means of their sudden collapse. One moment a liberal notion is cooking along as well and as unconsciously as ever, drawing no attention to itself, and the next its incoherence or absurdity are suddenly revealed to my conscious awareness and admitted to my concern by its contradiction – practical, logical, empirical – with other notions I feel sure are true. I never even notice these wrong-headed ideas or policies – call them illogismoi – until this happens. When it does, things appear to me in a new way – or rather, in what generally turns out to be quite an old way, that had never before seemed like a way at all.

I never know what will trigger these mental avalanches. Often it is quite a little thing.

This happened to me again recently when I was mulling Zippy Catholic’s arguments for the inherent injustice of property taxes. I have long thought that such taxes are indeed unjust – have hated them in my guts, together with capital gains taxes, estate and death taxes, business equipment taxes, and other levies against property. So when I read his arguments, my reaction was, “yeah, damn right.”

Now, suddenly, I am not so sure. Or perhaps I am. Bear with me, now, as I explain how consideration of property tax opened a new horizon to my fuddled sight. Or no, wait: a very old horizon, rather.

Vainglory & Hatred

Anyone who has for very long been a conservative – let alone a reactionary – will have found himself from time to time buffeted about by some acquaintance who is in the grip of a physiological syndrome endemic among liberals:

Rebellion → dysfunction → weakness → fear → anger → hate → dysfunction …

As it happens, my family and I have over the last few days been weathering a barrage of slings and arrows hurled by a few outraged liberals, on account of our extremely mild but public utterances of ritually impure ruminations on the latest waves of innovation in public policy. It’s painful, and above all tiresome. But one grows accustomed to it, over time. Until the Great Awakening, there will be no alternative.

The Metaphysics of Ownership

Zippy Catholic had a great post the other day on the nature of property that got me thinking about legal property versus ontological properties. I think I have been able to tie his account of ownership of property to a metaphysical basis.

Zippy’s post is short and succinct – unlike this one – and worth a read. The most important bits for my purposes here are these:

But real authority which produces genuine moral obligations does not ultimately derive from the human will, either simpliciter or in some theoretical aggregation mediated through some heretical theory of consent of the governed. The foundation of real authority is Nature and Nature’s God. …

Property exists when an owner exercises fungible authority over subjects with respect to one or more objects.

By “object” we don’t mean physical objects: we mean the things in the property relation which are not subjects. Subjects are of course persons: moral agents with the capacity to choose behaviors.

Bear these paragraphs of Zippy’s in mind as you work your way through what follows. We don’t begin with them; rather, we are working our way toward them.

To begin then at the beginning: the form of a thing is ordered to its telos. The form of an acorn cannot be even partly that of a carburetor, or it won’t be able to produce an oak. If it is to act as an acorn acts, it has to have the form of an acorn, which is to say, all the properties of an acorn.

Usury

Zippy Catholic has been interested in usury for some time now, and I have learned a lot about it from talking to him about it over the last few years. We’ve been having a colloquy over the last few days about whether government bonds constitute usury, which he has put up over at his site (here).

The basic thing to understand about usury, at least as St. Thomas approaches it, is that usury is selling what doesn’t actually exist. Zippy tried to explain this notion to me in a horribly long thread last year over at What’s Wrong with the World. The example that finally drove it into my understanding was this:

Zippy sells Lydia a $10K bond he has written, secured only by his promise to pay principal and interest (and not by any actual assets). Lydia in turn sells Kristor a similar $10K bond that she has written, again secured only by her promise to pay. Kristor then sells Zippy an exactly similar $10K bond that he has written. Note that no change has occurred in the real wealth – the real productive capacity, the causal power – of any of the three. If any one of them defaulted, they’d all default, and they’d all be in the same situation they had been in before any of the notes were sold.

This is more or less what happened in the Crash of 08.

When the Treasury sells you a bond that is backed only by its own promise to pay, does that constitute usury? Those of you who are into this kind of thing might want to check out what Zippy has to say on the subject. I’m not quite sure he’s convinced me, but neither am I sure I yet know exactly why I feel that way. Working on it!