Category Archives: Weekend Updates

10th Grade: The Rules of War

by Dave Mathwin

Greetings,

We began the actual fighting of the Revolutionary War this week, with a focus on the generalship of George Washington.

But we began by looking at the tactics employed by the colonials at the Battle of Concord.

After the British broke through the lines like a knife through hot butter at Lexington, the colonials changed tactics after the British abandoned their search for weapons in Concord.  Rather than meet them out in the open, the hid amidst the treelines, taking potshots and then melting back into the woods.  The British had no effective way of countering this.

This infuriated the British, of course.  This was not how men fought!  What kind of coward fires from safety and then runs away?  Battle was meant as a test of honor, solidarity in the ranks, and courage under fire.  Fighting as the colonials did at Concord might be akin to one team poisoning the water of their opponent.  If they then won the game, would we call that victory?

There is a possibly apocryphal story of the Battle of Fontenoy, between the British and French in 1745.  Tradition says that both sides argued about who which side would strike the first blow. Lord Hay, the British general, supposedly asked, “Gentlemen of France, perhaps you would care to fire first?”

The Battle of Fontenoy

For the Europeans, for battle to be decisive, for it to mean anything, it must be ‘fair.’  Victory without ‘fairness’ solved nothing.

Students wisely countered with the fact that this analogy of a sports team doesn’t quite add up.  First of all, it’s against the law to poison water, where there is no law saying that armies must line up in the middle of field.  Secondly, why should the colonials have to fight on British terms according to British strengths?  The  colonial troops should be free to do what they do best.

These are good arguments.  What happens when we apply them to our current situation in “The War on Terror?”  We would all wish that the terrorist radicals would all line up in a field somewhere.  If this happened, the “War on Terror” would be over in about 15 minutes.  Naturally, they possess enough intelligence not to do this, so they choose other tactics.  Does this make them cowards?  Are they “playing fair?”  Where are the differences?  Some said that the differences lie in the treatment of civilians, and this is an excellent point.  Does the same difference apply to the Ft. Hood shooting a few years ago, where only military personnel were targeted?

To turn this further on ourselves, we should confront the fact that our extensive use of drones inspire a great deal of hatred.  For our enemies (and the innocent civilians in the line of fire), our use of drones is ultimately a cowardly act.  We put others at risk while risking nothing ourselves.  The drones hover in ways not accessible to retaliation, and they strike without giving anyone a chance to escape.  My guess is that if terrorists flew a small drone into a large city remotely and attacked people, we would be tempted to call it a “cowardly act.”

It’s important for us to realize (returning to our original context) that for the British raw military victory did not count in the same way that honor and integrity did in battle.  Wars happened, but wars should take place within the confines of civilization, not outside it.  How one fought was in itself a victory of sorts, and could not get separated from the tangible results on the field.

During our look at Washington, we noted that he won only 3 of his 9 revolutionary war battles.  Previously to the American Revolution, he may have been responsible for the Fort Necessity disaster with the French, and he accompanied Braddock on his ill-fated attempt to capture Fort Duquense.  Does he deserve his high reputation?

Some years ago I came across a book entitled, ‘The 100 Greatest Generals of All-Time’ (or something very close to that).  Lists are always fun for me, so I opened it out of curiosity.  As one might expect the usual suspects of Julius Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Ghengis Khan, etc. could be found in the top 10.  But his number 1 general of all-time?  George Washington.

This shocked me so I had to read his thoughts (was this shock value part of the author’s motivation for listing him at #1, and not say, at #4?).  His points were these:

  • Many of the generals in the list accomplished a great deal militarily but failed politically (i.e. Alexander, Julius Caesar).  Some had short-term political success, but could not make it last (i.e. Napoleon).
  • Some of the generals (again Alexander and Caesar) inherited what was likely the best army in the known world at the time and fought against weaker opponents (this could especially be said about Alexander).
  • By contrast, Washington faced the best with an untrained army with weak political support.  As commander-in-chief, not only did he win the war, he turned that victory into lasting political success for his side.  Not only did he help usher in a new political era, he did so without seizing control himself.
  • Washington had a solid understanding of the fact that the Americans only needed to ‘not lose’ the war to win it. He knew that keeping the army intact and functional was more important than risking the army in unsure scenarios. Orderly retreat could sometimes be the better part of valor.  Most military men can’t do this consistently even when intellectually they know it’s the right thing to do.  Washington did so, and distinguished himself thereby.
  • Former Georgetown Hoya basketball coach John Thompson says on occasion, “I don’t want to know how many points somebody scores in a game.  I want to know when he scores them.  What do his points mean for the team in a given situation?”  In the same vein, Washington knew how to minimize the impact of his defeats and maximize his victories.  When things looked bleak in the winter of 1776, for example, he came through in the battles of Trenton and Princeton.  It would be years before his next victory at Yorktown in 1781, but the British surrender there basically gave America its independence.

As I mentioned previously, it is possible the author listed Washington so high to distinguish his book from others. Still, I feel he has solid arguments to at least rank him highly.  I wanted to use our look at Washington to introduce the concept that in war success can come in many ways.  Since war is ultimately a political act, the battles themselves are simply one extension of the conflict.

When we think about war in broader terms, we see how many of England’s advantages (such as an elite professional army) meant little in the political context of the Revolution.  They had the unenviable task taking someone who didn’t want to be your friend anymore and making them a friend.  Would beating them up do the trick?  Over the previous 10 years (1764-75) the British proved politically inept with the colonies, so a political solution would not come easily for them.  If they went the route of force more or less exclusively they would need to absolutely pulverize the colonies so badly that further resistance would be physically and psychologically impossible.   As long as the Americans kept their heart beating, they could outlast England.  Washington, I think, understood this to his advantage.

Next week we will look at the battles of Saratoga as well as the Declaration of Independence.

Enjoy the weekend, and many thanks,

Dave Mathwin

12th Grade: Wag the Dog

by Dave Mathwin

Greetings,

Last week we looked at Athens’ disaster in Sicily and the subsequent and extensive fallout.

Why did Athens lose in Sicily?

Part of Thucydides’ brilliance lies in that he does not merely look at battles and personalities, but finds ways to link events to a grand narrative.  Athens had many strengths, and one could argue that their passion for excellence helped produce democracy.  But I think that something began to go wrong just prior to the Peloponnesian War with the completion of the Parthenon, one of the great architectural achievements in history.  Ostensibly the building stands as a temple to Athena, the patron goddess of the city.  But a closer look at the carvings on the Parthenon reveal not scenes of gods and goddesses but of events in their own history.  Athens had in fact, made a temple to themselves, and showed that the true god they worshipped was their own community.

What kind of impact would this idolatry have, and what does it have to do with democracy?  Part of answering this question has to do with what we say the essence of democracy is.  If we say that the mere act of voting, of having a voice, is the meaning of democracy, than a naval-gazing, self-worshipping state will not be far behind.  For in this situation the process counts, and not the result.  If democracy (or any other form of government) serves a higher ideal than it has a built in check upon itself.  With no higher ideal than whatever decision we arrive at must by definition be good, because we thought of it.  This kind of attitude, present in ancient Athens, leads to disaster eventually.  If we travel with our heads down we’ll eventually walk off a cliff.  G.K. Chesterton has a great quote about self-worship in his book Orthodoxy,

That Jones shall worship the god within turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.  Let Jones worship the sun, the moon, anything rather than the “Inner Light.”  Let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, but not the god within.  Christianity came into the world firstly in order to assert with violence that a man had not only to look inwards, but outwards. . . . The only fun of being a Christian was that a man was not left alone with the Inner-Light, but definitely recognized an outer light, fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible as an army with banners.

The problems with Athens’ expedition to Sicily can be traced to their democracy.  Alcibiades wanted the expedition, Nicias opposed it.  Both had wealth, political and military experience, each had their own political power base at home.  They also could not stand each other.  Their personal and political rivalry spilled over into the formation of Athens’ war policy in Sicily.  For example, Nicias’ purely personal political moves against Alcibiades ended up having a dramatic effect on the composition of the numbers and kind of military forces Athens used against Sicily, and perhaps even the goal of the mission.  One wonders if they realized this.  With their heads down, I think not.  In my opinion, they thought that

  • We voted, just as always
  • We picked experienced people
  • We followed the procedures and processes to arrive at a decision

Therefore, everything is fine!

Democracy has to involve more than mere voting, more than mere process.  The Athenians apparently did not see that in voting for the expedition they had approved a massive invasion of another democratic country not directly involved in the war they had been fighting.  The man who ultimately led them (Nicias) argued against any expedition at all.  Self-worship exacted its price in the thousands of dead outside Syracuse.  In his An Historian’s Approach to Religion AJ Toynbee wrote,

The strength of the devotion that parochial-community-worship thus evokes holds its devotees in bondage to it even when it is carrying them to self-destruction; and so the warfare between contending parochial states tends to grow more intense and more devastating in a crescendo movement. Respect for one’s neighbours’ gods and consideration for these alien gods’ human proteges are wasting assets. All parochial-community-worship ends in a worship of Moloch, and this ‘horrid king’ exacts more cruel sacrifices than the Golden Calf. War to the death between parochial states has been the immediate external cause of the breakdowns and disintegrations of almost all, if not all, the civilizations that have committed suicide up to date.

Athens’ failure in Sicily brought about the collapse of their democratic regime.  Their god had failed to provide for their basic needs, and needed replaced.

The oligarchs that replaced the democracy fared no better, ruling wantonly based on the pent-up sense that now is was “their turn.”  We sometimes see this when one party, shut out of Congress for a time, suddenly gains control.  This “my-turn” attitude usually leads to over-reaching and miscalculation.  The Newt Gingrich led government shut down in the mid-90’s comes to mind.

Democracy came back, but the instability engendered by these power struggles weighed like a mill-stone around the Athenians necks.  They had no anchor beyond their immediate needs.  We saw Athens 1) Win the Battle of Arginusae, then 2) Put the victorious generals to death for impiety, and finally 3) Put the lawyer who prosecuted the generals to death (we never should have listened to him!) all within the span of  several days.  Process trumped justice.  The tail wagged the dog.

Authenticity, Man

by Dave Mathwin

Having flamed out on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, I was happy to find a more bite-sized chunk of his thought in The Ethics of Authenticity. I admit to approaching the book, like others of a traditional bent, leaning against the very idea of authenticity. “Get over yourself, already.” The search for meaning within the self can never go anywhere and remains something of an illusion. What, after all is there to really “experience?”

The whole concept of “authenticity,” born out of the 1960’s (or so I thought), has given rise to a whole host of modern problems. All of the issues with sex and gender have their roots here, as does a great deal of spiritual innovation with the church, along with the Trump presidency. Many inclined to read this book of Taylor’s might hope for a thorough denunciation from the venerable professor.

Of course, boring conservatives such as myself may not have always been such. We may remember the days of our youth when it seemed we had to break free from our surroundings to see what we were made of. Taylor taps into this, and so, while he criticizes much of what the “Authenticity” stands for, and finds it ultimately self-defeating, he reminds us that a kernel of something like the truth remains within this–in my view– unpleasant husk. Taylor writes,

The picture I am offering is rather than of an ideal that has been degraded . . . So what we need is neither root-and-branch condemnation nor uncritical praise; and not a carefully balanced tradeoff. What we need is a work of retrieval . . .

Taylor demonstrates that of what we term “authenticity” has its roots in Christianity. In the ancient world nearly every person received their identity by what lay wholly outside their control, be it birth, race, family, etc. The triumph of Christianity meant believing that an entirely other world lay outside of our normal lives, the Kingdom of God, in which there existed “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free . . . (Gal. 3:28).” The book of Revelation tells us that God “will also give that person a white stone, with a new name written on it, known only to the one who receives it (Rev. 2:17). St. Augustine’s magnum opus told us that the City of God lies nestled, in some ways, within the City of Man, to be discovered by anyone willing to walk through the wardrobe.

18th century Romantic thinkers, primarily Jean-Jacques Rousseau, picked up this dormant thread, albeit thin sprinting with it in ways that St. Augustine would abhor. I find the 18th century an absolute disaster for the Church, but still, Taylor calls me to at least a degree of balance. There was something quite ridiculous and artificial about the French aristocracy, for example, ca. 1770, accurately portrayed (I think) in this clip from John Adams

Perhaps St. Augustine did see “the road to God as passing through a reflexive awareness of ourselves” (p. 27). Many have pointed out how psychologically oriented was Martin Luther’s view of salvation. John Calvin began his Institutes by asking his readers to heed the Socratic dictum to “know thyself,” for knowledge of God and ourselves have an inextricable link. But Taylor sees Rousseau as the main originator of the modern view of authenticity. For Rousseau, “Our moral salvation comes from recovering authentic moral contact with ourselves,” and, “Self determining freedom demands that I break free from external impositions and decide for myself alone” (p. 27).

Well . . . ok. I don’t like the concept of authenticity but perhaps the difference lies in the “time of day.” What I mean is, bacon and eggs smells wonderful on the skillet when you’re hungry before breakfast, but that same smell hits one very differently with a full belly after lunch. The early Romantic movement, just as with the early Enlightenment, had good points to make. Rousseau championed, among other things, mothers actually breast-feeding their own children–something dramatically out of fashion for his time. Connecting with “nature” and the “self” I suppose could lead to more morally responsible living. You cannot blame your birth or other circumstances for who you are. But let it linger too long and you get the ridiculous movie Titanic, riddled through with romantic and “authentic” ideology–the smell of bacon and eggs at 10 am after you have already eaten. Still, Taylor asks the reader to see the premise of the morning before jumping straight to the twilight.

As for today, Taylor points out a variety of ways in which the “authenticity” narrative has gone astray.

Rousseau and his followers helped fuel democratic movements at home and abroad, but having created democracies in part through the dignifying the self, these same democracies would make a mockery of the original golden thread. Liberated from tradition, democratic man seemed to attain authenticity not via stern moral struggle against tradition, but as a birthright. If we are all authentic, then are all special, and thus, we all need recognized and regarded by others.

Taylor’s insights show us why those, for example, like Kaitlyn Jenner can be granted moral weight. The Authenticity narrative tells us that such people have attained a status of “real” humans because of their “courage” to make war even on biology itself–the final frontier–in order to achieve their version of true personhood. And, while I believe that those who alter their sex (if such a thing is truly possible) make terrible and tragic decisions, Taylor hints at why those that make these decisions often find them so empowering. Seeking a “genuine” connection with the self is the modern version of a transcendent experience. We grant large amounts of authority to those that have them, like the mystics of old.

Taylor also points out the endgame in store for “authenticity” lay implicit in its origins. If the self is to be the guide, and self-actualization has the ultimate authority, then we have a contradiction. The self can never be absolute, certainly not over others. Telling someone about your “experience” is nearly as bad as telling someone about the dream you had last night. In the end, we require an outside reference.

Alas, logical contradictions will likely not derail the Authenticity movement. But it is possible that time may take of this in ways that logic cannot.

I mentioned above the analogy of the smell of bacon before and after breakfast, and the analogy holds true in other aspects of life. In his War and Civilization compilation Toynbee admits the allure of the “morning” of a military outlook when reading the Iliad. Homer’s battle scenes have a dramatically bracing effect. Then, fast-forward to 19th century, where Prussian militarists like Helmuth von Moltke give one an entirely different impression of essentially the same thing that Homer described:

Perpetual Peace is a dream–and not even a beautiful dream–and War is an integral part of God’s ordering of the Universe. In War, Man’s noblest virtues come into play: courage and renunciation, fidelity to duty and a readiness to sacrifice that does not stop short of offering up Life itself. Without War the World would be swamped in materialism

Toynbee comments that, “there is a note of passion, of anxiety, and of rancor,” here that takes far away from the Greek poets. Moltke continues, perhaps even aware that he sails too close to the wind;

It is when an institution no longer appears necessary that fantastic reasons are sought or invented for satisfying the instinctive prejudice in its favor, which its long persistence has created.

If the modern Liberal order was created in part on the back of Authenticity, then surely we might say that those who still champion the idea copy Moltke and indeed invent “fantastic reasons” for the path they take. Perhaps Authenticity has run its course and can go into hibernation. We will wake it up when the scales have tipped too far in the other direction.

Dave

Zombie Markets in Everything

by Dave Mathwin

This post’s title, of course, has its origins with Tyler Cowen . . .

It seems as if we are living in a tale of two cities. It is the best and worst of times. One the one hand, the economy is great, and unemployment is way down. Public intelllectuals like Steven Pinker proclaim that, however bad things may be in certain segments of life, all the most important indicators show remarkable growth and progress, such as a sharp decline in infant mortality. Momentary trends may not always look favorable, but the arc of the last 300 years shows a continual rise in progress thanks to science and the application of reason. The complaining and angst so prevalent in the media, then, resembles that of a spoiled child. If we could all just calm down and count our blessings . . .

But others like Jordan Peterson, John Vervacke, and Jonathan Pageau state that western civilization exists by a thin thread in the midst of a deep meaning crisis–a crisis that perhaps hits men harder than women. Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide have risen dramatically over the last 20 years. I think Vervacke would tell Pinker that he sees only a fragmented surface. I suppose Pinker and others like him would say such people are fundamentally deluded.

Chronologically we have mirror images from both camps. Pinker and his crowd write that starting around AD 1700, the Enlightenment took hold and over the next few centuries the world became a dramatically better place. But for those on the other side, the Enlightenment disastrously contributed to all the problems we have now in relation to meaning and knowing our place in the world (though others would go further back still, into the Renaissance).

Most would say one or the other is true, and you have to choose. Below I propose a theory that will attempt a “both-and” explanation–a highly speculative one–that will attempt to explain how the economy can grow and life can improve in various measurable ways and we can still struggle with meaning. In fact, the two may have a symbiotic relationship.

The perception of a current meaning crisis has led to the dramatic recent rise of the psychologist as guru, i.e., Jordan Peterson. John Vervacke has less fame, and popularizes less than Peterson (I do not use the term ‘popularizes’ derogatorily). His analysis goes deeper, and his co-authored book Zombies in Western Culture: A Twenty-First Century Crisis gives a slightly sideways but effective analysis of modern culture. Vervacke et. al do not blame the right or the left, campus ideology, or Trumpism, for the decay. “Decay” is indeed the right word, for zombies are decomposed beings of some undefinable kind. Our modern disease has infected most all of us to some degree.

Each era has its monsters that help define its zeitgeist. As the Enlightenment settled across western Europe, and scientific materialism began to entrench itself as the dominant ideology, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, which explores the limits of man’s powers over nature. The monster in the book of course, is not the “Monster” but Dr. Frankenstein, it’s creator. A few decades later we have Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In the Victorian era, the aristocracy still exists, but exists in a weird place in society given the nascent rise of democratic ideals. Everyone perhaps feels in their bones that the aristocracy no longer serve a real purpose, isolated as they are within a culture that no longer needs them. One notes that, in contrast with pre-modern Europe, in the modern age the monster is a twisted human, though perhaps still a kind of tragically grand monster. That is, at least there exists some kind of high aspiration for a Dr. Frankenstein or Count Dracula.

Vervacke argues that the zombie is the monster for the 21st century, and the graph below shows the dramatic increase of the word in the popular culture just recently, just as the Cold War ended.

Zombies have the following characteristics:

  • They move in packs, but have no connection to one another
  • They have no particular intent–they exercise no conscious will towards evil.
  • They live only to consume, and their hunger to consume cannot be satiated or even lessened.
  • Constantly on the move, they have no home base or concept of home.

In other words, they form the perfect monster for the democratic age.

The zombie personifies our crisis of meaning. The internet, globalization, etc. means we can indeed consume as we like virtually for free, but though we like to sing along, we “know not what it means.”* The market also thrives on fluidity and movement. It is best for everybody to give everybody else money, for example, rather than everybody put it under their mattress, even if that consumption has no real overall purpose or goal in mind.

So too the market of information thrives on abundance and transfer. But like zombies, we both crave and lack Mind, and so have no way to integrate our experience into a meaningful whole. Vervacke writes regarding this,

This is because the information we obtain from the world has never been more unreliable. Abundance is one dimension of the problem; one need look no further than news media to appreciate the sheer volume of (often irreconcilable) narratives.

And again,

Humans are animals who most fundamentally understand what reality is . . . by locating ourselves within larger narratives and meta narratives that we hear and tell . . . When such narratives collapse, we are lost in the dislocation, fragmentation, and disorientation of homelessness.

So far so good, but what of the other side of the coin, i.e., a strong economy, less violence worldwide, and so on? Vervacke gives us the link. If truly we are the “walking dead,” then lacking mind and the means to integrate our experience, we would naturally seek expansive consumption as a means of coping. This consumption is a byproduct of all of the intense focus on the material aspects of creation fostered in western culture during the time period Pinker cites. It indeed brought great blessings of a certain kind, but it could possibly be nearing the end of its string.

Of course all humanity throughout all time has sought some sort of solution for a lack of understanding of the self. But our typical response is indeed to consume. We are depressed, we might go shopping. We are anxious, we “stress-eat.” We are out of sorts, we might consume information by browsing Facebook or news feeds. Such actions can distract us for a time, but also creates an unsustainable cycle. It is this drive to consume that makes solving certain environmental problems so difficult for all of us, whether Green or not so Green. The “peace” of the modern world championed by Steven Pinker has in some ways brought this out of us.

In contrast [to times of war], in times of relative peace, internal issues become more focal and so the opportunity for a relative loss of social integration is greater, hence the increase in the suicide rate.

This antipathy to peace can lead to increased participation in what the authors call the “pseudo-religion” of politics. Politics gives us much that religion provides.

As politics is, by necessity of governance naturally integrative of other systems, it was a proximal replacement for [meaning]. . . . systematic complexity made [politics] a convincing imitator of that normatively as the influence of religion diminished. The 20th century, therefore, bore witness to the rise of the most potent political pseudo-religion we have known in the modern world.

We risk ending the “peace” we have then, by feeding upon our own body politic, unable to stop our consumption of so called “outrage porn.” specialized in by Twitter and news media of all kinds. We can see this process of disintegration at work since the time of the vampire as monster. First, modernism deconstructed the church, and told us that it could no longer function as a means of communal coherence. “Religion should be private.” We then expected the state could serve that purpose, and so we developed various rituals around the symbols of the idea of nationhood. By the mid-20th century, we saw the folly of that project, but no fear–we can rally around our freedom to consume. So we built malls, accurately described by James K. Smith as spaces constructed for liturgical communal consumption.** But this no longer holds either. Now, like zombies, we roam the internet to consume, with no defined space to bind us.

In the old tales, the hero slays the dragon, but Vervacke points out that our zombie stories offer little hope. The plague always seems to grow, and those that survive will be continuously on the run. Rebuilding something new in these scenarios becomes extremely difficult. Patrick Deneen, for example, has a persuasive critique of the whole modern enterprise in Why Liberalism Failed. He blames progressives and conservatives nearly equally but offers no alternative political reality to which we can aspire. Slightly more hopeful is Rod Dreher, whose The Benedict Option, while giving no grand solution, at least points us towards embodied liturgical relationships with others as a good beginning.

With a quick search I found one place in our culture where a cure for zombies is possible: Minecraft. I find it charming that such a thing exists within this relatively benign (I dislike video games) world building enterprise, and that even many teens still play this game. It is interesting to see how they use traditional archetypes for this cure. Among other things needed to cure local villagers from being a zombie is dragon’s breath. In other words, the monster may be the only hope for the monster. Jonathan Pageau has often talked about how once a culture reaches the outer limits of the fringe, it takes just a small tap for everything to come right round again. The clown, or the fool, or perhaps even the monster is needed to make things right. It may be that if we are indeed in such a dark place, dawn is not far behind.

Dave

*Those my age, or fans of the music of early 90’s music, will recognize the Nirvana reference. In retrospect grunge music might be seen as a harbinger of the meaning crisis. How is it that right after winning the Cold War, when we should have celebrated and entered something of a golden age, we plunged ourselves into music that fundamentally celebrated alienation?

**We need not absolutely throw the baby out with the bathwater. National symbols and national identity can do us good. Market exchanges often benefit both parties. The problem is putting a weight on such things that they cannot bear. The only way they can bear the load of culture for long is to give them a kind of steroid. Of course one recalls the specter of the early 20th century regarding the problems of nationality. I also remember post-9/11 how we were all encouraged to keep spending so the terrorists would not win. It can work for a while, but the body gives out eventually.

Time Me

by Dave Mathwin

This post is slightly dated, as it was originally written three years ago.  I repost it based on our discussions in class this week . . . . .

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

I don’t follow baseball vey closely, nor do I watch many games.  I had no interest in watching the Home Run Derby before the All-Star game.  Unfortunately I still listen too frequently to sports talk radio.  After the said derby, commentators proclaimed that the new rules involving time limits had made the experience much more enjoyable.  “The clock saved the Home Run Derby,” proclaimed one radio host.  After discussing it briefly, they quickly turned to other areas of life where clocks could make things better, like for teenage daughters in bathrooms, bank lines, and so on.  If only we could have more clocks in our lives!

This got me reflecting a bit on the the invention of the clock.  Besides fire and the wheel, I have a hard time thinking of other inventions with as much staying power.  The influence of the clock goes so deep we don’t notice it.  Part of the motivation for me to read Authority, Liberty, & Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe by Otto Mayr was the hope that, among other things, he would give some perspective on the clock and its impact.

By “clock” Mayr means the mechanical clock.  People used sun-dials from ancient times, but even the most reliable  sun dials (in Egypt where the sun always shined) did not facilitate an acute subdivision of our experience of time.  In other more cloudy locales the sun-dial had even less influence.  The mechanical clock came on the scene in the late middle-ages and immediately made a dramatic impact on that society.  People fell in love immediately.  In his Paradiso Dante used the metaphor of the movement of a clock’s implements to describe the movement of the angels in heaven, and this merely stood as one example among many. The rare dissenting voice did exist.  The Welsh bard David Gwillym wrote,

Woe to the black faced clock which awoke me on the ditch side.  A curse on its head and tongue, its two ropes and heavy wheels, its weights, yards, and hammer, its ducks which think it day and its unquiet mills.  Uncivil clock like the foolish tapping of a tipsy cobbler, a blasphemy on its face.

But on the whole the “ayes” substantially overwhelmed the dissenters.  People praised the precision and complexity of the instrument, and almost immediately various metaphors for God’s design of the universe arose.  And as we might expect, no people sang such great peans to the clock as in Germany.

Such was the scene on the continent.  Yet those in England reacted far differently.  Yes, many liked the clock and it came into general use.  But far more dissented in England than in other places. In Love’s Labor Lost Shakespeare uses a “German clock” as an epithet.  In Richard II Shakespeare flips all the positive clock metaphors and in a soliloquy by Richard has the clock stands for a symbol of undue self-consciousness and a failed life.

Now sir, the sound that tells what hour it is

Are clamorous groans, that strike upon my heart

Which is the bell.  So sighs, and tears, and groans

Show minutes, times, and hours . . .

Why did they feel this way?  Here we get to the heart of the main idea of Mayr’s book.

Mayr believes that ultimately the answer lies in the different kinds of political cultures of England and the continent.  Briefly, authoritarian style politics had far more “boots on the ground” in places like Germany and France, which explains their love of the clock.  He develops the connection thusly: England’s political theory emphasized balance.  Whether they invented the idea of the “separation of powers” is beside the point.  They had a long history, predating the Magna Carta, of seeking equilibrium between different political bodies, which the European continent lacked.  This led England to put much more emphasis on developing “feedback” technologies.  These devices did not exert power so much as prevented one element from gaining too much power.  The thermostat serves as a good example of such a device.  It helps create balance.  Neither heat nor cold win the day. Notably, thermostats only come on when they need to correct the temperature.  Otherwise they lie dormant.

We may balk a bit at this distinction.  We may not consider the clock a device associated with unchecked power.  The clock may always be “on,” we surmise, but it exerts no direct influence over us.  Perhaps, but I think Mayr has a good point.  During the talk show I mentioned earlier, for example, all the ideas that people had related to people having to move faster because of the presence of the clock. They wanted the clock to make people act in certain definite ways.  Our speech reflects this as well. We “answer to the clock,” and so forth.  This idea played itself out politically.*  France had Louis XIV, Robespierre, and Napoleon. Prussia had Frederick the Great.  When England’s Charles I attempted to reign more independently he faced a revolution and the loss of his life.  Mary Tudor and James II also failed to introduce significant changes.**

The book moves along nicely to show how other “self-regulating” systems developed in England.  Aside from the political self-regulation between king, parliament, and courts, Adam Smith developed the idea of a self-regulating economy. Mercantilism, the prevailing economic theory in the 18th century, called for one to dominate other countries via exports over imports.  Smith believed the market could work much like a thermostat and correct itself with no government interference.  Central control of trade not only was unnecessary, but counter-productive.  We need not wonder about the veracity of Smith’s theory here.  What seems obvious from Mayr’s extensive knowledge is how developments throughout a particular culture have a common root.  The thermostat and Smith’s free market ideology come from the same place.

If the clock occupied pride of place for inventions from 1300-1800, what shall we say about our own day?  We would first need to decide what invention has pride of place in our society.  One would at this moment probably say the smart-phone, but we might wonder if in 10 years we will have moved on.  So we should settle on something larger, like “digital technology.”  As Peter Thiel has commented frequently, we have dramatically advanced the world of “bits” while the world of atoms has remained stagnant.  We need to look beyond mere profit and opportunity to understand why we have done so.

The digital universe excites us perhaps mainly because it has no discernible limits.  The powers of computers change all the time.  We can assume different identities, and so on.  We can always have our music.  We can contact anyone we want at any time.  It seems at times as if we can defy reality itself.  The world of atoms, however, confronts us with limits.  And if our recent behavior surrounding gender and sexuality give us any clues, we do not like limits.^  Our politics may soon start to reflect this and our corporate practice.^^  Who can say exactly where this will end up?  But if the trend continues we may need to revisit De Tocqueville’s dilemma regarding liberty (no limits on our actions) and equality.  We cannot have unfettered doses of both, for at some point they work against each other.  We must choose.  We still live in the real world.

Dave

*Compare Bishop Bousset’s explication of absolute monarchy for Louis XIV to James I (King of England) own writing on the subject.  Both reach similar conclusions, but in very different ways.  Bousset’s writing has an inexorable logical methodology.  James I writes more haphazardly, and more poetically.

**Henry VIII may be the exception that proves the rule.

^I re-watched The Matrix recently and noticed something curious.  At the end of the movie Neo speaks into the phone to the machines and tells them that he will show people “a world without limits, a world of possibility” and so on, and then proceeds to fly in the air.  But surely he refers to the world of the Matrix?  This is the world that offers the possibilities of dodging bullets.  In reality we remain subject to gravity.  On board their ship they have to wear dingy clothes and eat protein goop.  So what did Neo really mean?

True to form, the story starts to bleed out in the next two installments.  The Wachowski’s can’t stay content to let Neo be limitless merely in the Matrix (which makes some sense within their invented world).  By the end of Matrix Revolutions Neo can stop the Sentinels in reality just as he could stop bullets in the Matrix.  The Wachowski’s refuse even stay within the limits of their own story.

^^I like Amazon, but I found it a bit odd that they essentially tried to start their own holiday (Prime Day).

10th Grade: The Galileo Myth

by Dave Mathwin

This week we continued with many of the same themes as last week, with a special focus on Galileo.

Thomas HobbesBefore tackling him, we looked at the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes’ concerned himself mainly with outlining his vision of a workable political system, but he was strongly influenced by the tenor of the times.  Hobbes, like Descartes before him, believed that getting at the truth meant reducing the world to its simplest, most understandable components.  If we dig deep enough, we will finally find an irreducible foundation.  For Descartes, it was thought, and Hobbes builds his politics on the concept of motion.  Mankind, for Hobbes, was in many ways “matter in motion.”

The Scientific Revolution did indeed change many things, and this concept of knowledge may have been at the heart of those changes.  The Medieval philosopher would have argued that to see a thing truly, it must be seen as a whole of many parts.  Not only that, they would have gone further and said that to know a thing, one must know its purpose, its end, its “telos.”

Galileo continued the revolution in other facets of thought.  Copernicus had established the possibility of a heliocentric universe in the 16th century, and while his ideas did not gain wide acceptance, Copernicus was not a controversial figure.  Aristarchus of Samos had, in fact, proposed a similar theory in the 3rd century B.C.  Galileo caused controversy by proposing a new idea of how we arrive at truth, and blurred the lines between theory and fact.  In 1543 a man named Osiander wrote in the preface to Copernicus’ work that,

[W]hen from time to time there are offered for one and the same motion different hypotheses…, the astronomer will accept above all others the one which is easiest to grasp. The philosopher will perhaps seek the semblance of the truth. But neither of them will understand or state anything certain unless it has been divinely revealed to him…. So far as hypotheses are concerned, let no one expect anything certain from astronomy which cannot furnish it, lest he accept as the truth ideas conceived for another purpose and depart from this study a greater fool than when he entered it.

Owen Barfield, a contemporary of C.S. Lewis, wrote in his Saving the Appearances, that Galileo

began to affirm that the heliocentric hypothesis not only ‘saved the appearances,’ but was physically true.” What they professed was in fact a new theory of the nature of theory; namely that, if a hypothesis saves all the appearances, it is identical with truth.

What (I think) Barfield meant by the idea of “saving the appearances” was the old idea that our notions of scientific truth should do their best to explain the reality that we see around us, to preserve the validity of the senses.  However, this was always recognized to represent our “best guess” and may not reflect actual truth.

But after Galileo the burden of proof shifted.   Arthur Koestler writes in his book The Sleepwalkers that,

if theologians could not refute Galileo their case [would] go by default, and Scripture must be reinterpreted.  This implied (though Galileo did not dare state it explicitly) that the truth of the system was rigorously demonstrated. It is all so subtly done that the trick is almost imperceptible to the reader and, as far as I know, has escaped the attention of students to this very day. Yet it decided the strategy he was to follow in the coming years.

Galileo was right about the Earth’s rotation around the sun, though we would later discover that the sun, too, is in motion.  The issue that I wanted to stress to the students, however, was the fact that one can be right for the wrong reasons.  Many great scientific minds of this time were likely sincere Christians, but the ways which they reached their conclusions may have helped lead people away from Christianity.  True knowledge must involve more than what we see with our senses.

The Scientific Revolution also raised the question of how we should interpret Scripture.  To what degree should scientific discoveries impact how we read the famous passage about the sun standing still in Joshua?

On the day the Lord gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the Lord in the presence of Israel:

“Sun, stand still over Gibeon,
and you, moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.”
 So the sun stood still,
and the moon stopped,
till the nation avenged itself on its enemies,

as it is written in the Book of Jashar.

The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the Lord listened to a human being. Surely the Lord was fighting for Israel!

Of course the Church made mistakes at this time too.  In condemning Galileo they surely overreached and made themselves look silly, contributing to an unnecessary and unhealthy divide between science and faith that lasted for at least three centuries, from which we have fully to recover.
Dave

Time vs. Space Redux

by Dave Mathwin

Whether the conversations be thoughtful or awkward, Thanksgiving seems to be a time to think about the times we live in with our families. About a month ago I tried to think about our culture in deeper terms than merely red state vs. blue state, taxes, immigration, and so on. I think what’s plaguing us runs deeper (I base what follows on my previous post on this topic, which is here), though what follows should be seen as a thought experiment more so than anything definitive.

In that previous post I suggested that what might be “proper” tension between Time and Space could vary depending on the culture. So Egypt leaned heavily toward Space, Babylon towards Time, but both civilizations could be considered “great” in different ways. I have only scratched their respective surfaces, but if one reads their mythology and folklore I think we see that they both had some awareness of this necessary tension. My point previously was that we lack even this basic awareness and need to recast our thinking in order to understand our culture more fully.

The problem is not that we contain contradictions within ourselves. We overpraise consistency in most cases. We need the fluidity of Time and the stability of Space in some measure–a society built 100% on either reality would be both an absurdity and an impossibility. One can be 2-1 in favor of space, or 3-2 in favor of time. I think that our issue is, rather, that our different political sides embrace 100% of both without even realizing it. Our political choices then, border on the non-sensical and thus can only go into more subconscious symbolic realms.*

On the Left Time/Fluidity Scale:

  • Open borders–which makes the capital and labor maximally fluid
  • LGBT agendas (which often involve the erosion of the “fixed” state of nature and biology)
  • Maximal “Equality” for men/women (which includes strong pro-choice stances–“safe, legal, and rare” won’t cut it any more), which flatten out distinctions and traditions.

On the Right Time/Fluidity Scale:

  • Free market and free trade (few forces are more destabilizing to tradition, be it good or bad, then the free market, so though I apologize that I can only think of one example for the right, it is a really big one:).

On the Left Space/Stability Scale:

  • Higher minimum wage laws, which restricts the flow of free labor, along with a penchant for corporate regulation.
  • Safe spaces and tight restrictions on what can be said so that the “communal identity” might be preserved

On the Right Space/Stability Scale:

  • Build a wall, protect our borders
  • I don’t see a strident nationalism in the U.S. as a huge problem, but if it came it would certainly come from the right

Again, it is one thing to hold positions in some kind of balance, it is another to hold them maximally in different areas without even being aware of the contradictions.

Once we see that our differences run into mutually contradictory realms, we naturally look for who or what to blame for our predicament. Some say the iPhone, the internet, the 2008 stock market crash, identity politics, the War in Iraq, Newt Gingrich, and so on. But I think we have to go further back. If there is any consolation for us, I don’t think millennials, Get-X’ers, or Boomers started all this.

Perhaps we can begin with the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment valued (at least at the beginning) common things for common people. That era valued self-control of body and emotions. So far they lean heavily on the side of Stability/Space. But at the same time they gave strong preference to syllogistic reason, the province of the mind and the elite. Jefferson, Rousseau and others also propounded the most universal ideas (which have no boundaries) in the modern era–“all men are created equal,” and “the rights of man,” from the French Revolution, and so on. It is no wonder that the French Revolution swung so wildly so quickly.

Then we have the Romantic era. On the one hand, they praised emotion which put them heavily on the side of Time/Fluidity. But at the same time the Romantic movement gave birth to the modern recovery of folklore, fairy tales, and a kind of ethno-nationalism seen in Wagner, among others, all of which strongly favor Space/Stability.

The dramatic tension in the Romantic movement has a touchstone example in England’s empire. They spread throughout the globe (Time) but also sought to bring England’s culture (Space) everywhere they went. Such tension might very well produce something of a “schism in the soul” that Toynbee often wrote about.

In W.W. II both of the major Axis powers (Germany and Japan) sought to mimic the British in far, far more hideous ways.

  • Both Germany and Japan were strong ethno-nationalist states, yet both sought a significant increase of their territorial reach.
  • Both had strongly hierarchical views of authority (Space), but their military strategies strongly favored continual motion and speed (observe how Hitler took the traditional swastika image and pivoted it to give the impression of continuous forward motion. The problem being, of course, is that the swastika shape cannot “move.” It could not spin or roll forward. Thus, the inherent contradictions of Nazism were present right within its foremost symbol).
  • I believe that both countries perhaps subconsciously pursued impossible objectives that could only end in cataclysmic defeat–the kind of destruction that can come only with a violent clash of two opposing forces (I write a bit about this here).

In our own land we have struggled with the same dichotomies. Our blended form of government gets somewhat near a political balance of Time & Space. But in truth, we have no truly conservative tradition outside of democracy to call upon, which can lead to excess fluidity of the liberal democratic tradition. We have a strong sense of land (stability) being tied to liberty (fluidity) inherited from Aristotle, Locke, et al. but showed an outsized and continuous desire for more and more land–a quasi schizophrenia between Time and Space. Every political theorist on democracy thought that for it to work it needed contained in a small space–“stability” to balance out the “fluidity” of liberty. We said “no thanks” to that and immediately upon getting our independence, we began rapidly expanding our territory, believing that perhaps everyone else was wrong about this political calculus.

Possibly this can give us some perspective on the current Time/Space war in our culture. If it feels like it is accelerating, it may be because we are entering another election cycle, or perhaps it is the pace of life which our ubiquitous “time-saving” technologies push us towards. But I think too that both political parties contribute to this by jumping into the mosh-pit.

On the ACLU Twitter homepage their banner reads, “Fight for the Country We Want to Live In.” I don’t wish to pick on the ACLU per se–my point likely could have been made with other organizations, though I do fear that they too are becoming overly politicized. The country we “want” to live in? The country I want to live in is an impossible pipe-dream of my own personal fancies.** No one should want me to fight for the country I want to live in. The country I need involves something much more politically feasible–a balance between Time and Space, and left and right. That perhaps, is worth a fight.

Dave

A postscript from the recent British election which may show us how to reduce the tension between Time and Space:

He has done what no other conservative leader in the West has done: He has co-opted and thereby neutered the far right. The reactionary Brexit Party has all but collapsed since Boris took over. Anti-immigration fervor has calmed. The Tories have also moved back to the economic and social center under Johnson’s leadership. And there is a strategy to this. What Cummings and Johnson believe is that the E.U., far from being an engine for liberal progress, has, through its overreach and hubris, actually become a major cause of the rise of the far right across the Continent. By forcing many very different countries into one increasingly powerful Eurocratic rubric, the E.U. has spawned a nationalist reaction. From Germany and France to Hungary and Poland, the hardest right is gaining. Getting out of the E.U. is, Johnson and Cummings argue, a way to counter and disarm this nationalism and to transform it into a more benign patriotism. Only the Johnson Tories have grasped this, and the Johnson strategy is one every other major democracy should examine.

*By this I mean that we will make our political choices more from our gut and less from our head. This will likely give an advantage to Trump, who seems quite comfortable governing from his gut impulses.

**Growing up I swore that if I ever became King of the U.S.A., I would first and foremost make it illegal for bands to release a “Greatest Hits” album with one new song on it–something routinely done in the 80’s and 90’s. The internet has fortunately solved this for me, but in so doing it did take away what was to be a major plank in my policy platform.

If Civilization is Worth Doing, it’s Worth Doing Badly

by Dave Mathwin

Historian Arnold Toynbee takes the long view–the very long view, on the fall of Rome.  We think of Rome as a grand empire, but Toynbee reminds us both in his book Hellenism, and in Hannibal’s Legacy, that Rome originally organized itself very much like other Greek city-states.  The early Roman Republic was essentially a polis.  As they grew in size, the political dynamics changed until little to nothing remained of its more democratic past.  But if we think of Rome as a “Republic” first and foremost, we should place the decline of Rome somewhere in the transition between the 3rd-2nd cenutry B.C. at the absolute latest.*

Toynbee takes this approach because he sees civilizations operating in a spiritual sense.  He focuses on the beliefs, the internal coherence, the relationships between different groups in society, and so on.  He has long sections in volumes five and six of his multi-volume A Study of History on the “schism in the soul” present in declining civilizations, which might strike one with a more materialist bent as rather absurd.

Niall Ferguson takes a different approach, and I believe that I see common themes in his books, Civilization, Colossus, and Empire.  Ferguson sees civilization running on various physical platforms, such as the quality of roads, a good sewer system, and a good way of gathering and using tax revenue.**  He eschewed the idea of slow, steady decline–or at least one that we could observe in any meaningful way.  For him, the system works until suddenly it doesn’t, and no one can really predict when it will stop working. This explains why no one saw the collapse of the Soviet Union coming, or various stock-market crashes.  The collapses, when they come, will therefore come out of the blue suddenly.

Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Socieities is a short, dense, book about a difficult subject. Tainter does a good job with his argument, which I admit even I though I disagree with some of his basic premises.

His argument boils down to a few key points:

  • Major civilizations tend to experience an early period of rapid growth through the ‘low hanging fruit’ of available territory, resources, etc.
  • This growth inevitably leads to specialization, stratification, and complexity which initially serves growth–though this “low-hanging fruit” won’t last forever.
  • The civilization plateau’s and the structure established to help it grow becomes an inextricable  part of society just at the moment that it is no longer really needed.
  • When the ‘low hanging fruit’ disappears, further expansion (be it territorial, trade-oriented) becomes less and less profitable, and eventually starts to work against the civilization.
  • Finally, the complex structure gets too unwieldy, a ball and chain, as the state has to spend more and more to get less and less. But now we depend on the structure.   It has become too big to fail, but like a house of cards, easy to knock over.

Tainter supports his theory well from civilizations across time, and uses very obvious info, like territory, and some other more unusual information, like crop yields, colonial administrations, and so on. No doubt there are many lessons for economists here.

But, while his book is valuable, it has big holes.

In his quest for absolute objectivity, he rejects all value-judgment theories of collapse. If you can’t measure it, it’s not useful. We can never be sure exactly a civilization really believes, and even if we could, it is not an objective field of study, so has nothing to contribute to the study of collapse. After a brief summary of  the work of people like Gibbon, Toynbee, Spengler, and others he dismisses them with a wave of his hand. But as C.S. Lewis once pointed out, very few people are actually German economists. Any study of history must involve people, which will involve more than graphs on paper.

This over-emphasizing of economics shows up in what is actually a thought-provoking idea. What happens after collapse, he argues, may actually be beneficial to society, because it removes a great deal of inefficiency that the old system labored under. Collapse, might be the cleansing forest fires of history, events to almost welcome.

This sounds good on paper, but no actual human being who lived through collapses would have agreed with him. Imagine living in Western Europe ca. 550 AD and thinking, “Boy, I sure am glad for the fall of Rome. Of course, our ramshackle village could be overrun, destroyed, and our people pillaged who knows when by some Goth, Ostrogoth, Visigoth, Vandal, Hun, or some other kind of Goth I have forgotten about. But I’ll take that any day over the economic inefficiency of the late Roman Empire.”

To augment Chesterton’s oft-quoted phrase (If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,” “If civilization is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”

Dave

 

*I love and admire Toynbee for many reasons.  But in some places he puts the decline of Rome at 431 B.C. (!), the same year as the outbreak of the Pelopponesian War in Greece.  He does this mostly because he sees much more similarity than difference between Greece and Rome.  One can make that argument, and he does so decently in his Recollections, but to carry it so far as to say that Rome began declining when Athens hit the wall goes way too far.

**In some ways the difference between Toynbee and Ferguson boils down, as (almost) always, to the differences between Plato and Aristotle.  Both are great–I prefer Toynbee and Plato.

Epilogue

I almost always find Toynbee stimulating, and I include some of his collected thoughts on the fall of Rome . . .

It is indeed, one of the tragic ironies that the idealists that arise within the ruling class should tread the same path of social migration as the wastrels.  The Graachi worked far greater havoc through a nobility [in the late Republic] to which someone like Commodus could never aspire. Commodus did far less damage by his own social truancy [i.e., pretending to be Hercules, fighting in the arena, etc.], by engaging in a vulgarity that represents a spiritual malaise, to which the Graachi would never fall.  

By their ‘downward migration’ towards the plebs, the Graachi incurred the wrath of their fellows, who punished them severely for abandoning their class privilege.  Commodus is uneventfully swallowed by the slough in which he delighted to wallow, whereas the Graachi released a kind of demonic energy into the masses of Rome.

*********

Seneca writes ca. A.D. 60 concerning the social function of the Emperor in one of his treatises. . .

 

“He is the bond that holds the Commonwealth together, he is the breath of life is breathed by his subjects, who in themselves would be nothing but a burden and a prey if they were left to their own devices through the removal of a presence which is the soul of the Empire.

 

Their king is safe?  One mind informs them all;

Lost?  They break faith straightway.

*********

If this calamity, written about by Vergil in his Georgics (IV, 212-13), which he imagines overtaking the bees, would overtake us, the people would be safe so long as it does not snap the reins, or–if they refuse to be bridled again.  Should this happen–then the texture of this mighty empire would be rent and its present tidiness would fly apart into a hundred shreds. Rome will cease to rule the moment they cease to render obedience.”

A foretaste of the fulfillment of the prophecy that Seneca made to the Emperor Nero was inflicted on the Roman world in A.D. 68-69 as an immediate result of Nero’s tyranny; but the first time round this calamity acted as a stimulus, for after the chaos Rome got Vespasian as emperor and relative calm.  Though Domitian (d. A.D. 96) tried his utmost to revive the chaos by claiming deity for himself, the tide was turned by a series of beneficial philosopher emperors who succeeded one another from Nerva (A.D. 96) through Marcus Aurelius (d. A.D. 180).

It was only after Marcus that the new “time of troubles” set in, and even then foolishness of Commodus managed to right itself after the civil wars of Severus, who repeated Vespasian’s work, though with a rougher and less skilled hand.  It was only after the death of Alexander Severus (A.D. 235) that the storm broke with shattering and uncontrollable violence.

*********

And finally, some of his thoughts on the drawn out length of Roman decline:

In the downward course of a civilization there is truth in the saying of the philosopher Heraclitus: “War is the father of all things.”  The sinister concentration of the resources of a civilization upon the business of fratricidal warfare may generate a military prowess that will place their neighbors at their mercy, may create a military technique that may grant them a far reaching technical mastery over the merely “Material World.”   

Since it is common to reckon success primarily by power and wealth, the opening chapters in the decline of a civilization will be hailed as times of blessing and growth, and this misconception can persist even for centuries.  Sooner or later, however, disillusionment is bound to follow, for a society that is hopelessly divided against itself is almost certain to try and double down on military might, for that is what seemed to work initially.

For example, we see the money-power and man-power won for Greek society by Alexander the Great, and these same vast resources used to intensify the civil wars between Alexander’s successors.  This same power swept into Roman hands through the meteoric rise in Rome’s land and wealth ca. 241-146 B.C. was just as quickly spent in the various civil wars that wracked Rome before the rise of Augustus and the Pax Romana.  For Spain, the treasure gained in the new world and the free labor of the essentially enslaved native populations was the food for their wars in Europe during the late 16th and early 17th centuries–the same wars that brought them into second-rate power status in Europe.

Thus the increasing command over the environment gained is apt to bestow upon a society a disintegration that puts a greater driving power into the suicidally demented society’s chosen work of self-destruction; and that story turns out to be a simple illustration of the theme that, “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23).  And again, the empires of industrialized Europe in the late 19th century gained the material resources to nearly destroy European civilization in our great Western civil war of 1914-18.

[Toynbee goes on to argue at length that Augustan synthesis bought Rome time, and brought Rome increased prosperity, nevertheless, it was an “Indian Summer” that lasted about 175 years that did nothing to fix Rome’s basic issues or  prevent the coming winter.]

 

 

 

10th Grade: The Death of a King

by Dave Mathwin

Greetings to all,

This week we looked at the building tension between Parliament and Charles I.  The civil war that eventually came would, in the long term, change the way the western world thought of political power.

As I mentioned last week, Charles inherited the ideas of absolute monarchy from his father James.  As some commentators, have suggested, however, there was a difference.  For James absolutism was an intellectual question, and thus a conviction he could dispense with, or at least minimize, when the time called for it.  For Charles, absolutism was a emotional issue, and one associated with his religious convictions.  It ran deeper for him, he believed in it with his heart instead of his head.

It would be wrong to say that Charles coveted power for the sake of power.  His conception of England was a realm that needed a shepherd.  He viewed England in personal terms.  His “High Church” Anglicanism serves as an example of this.  Yes, Charles liked ceremony, but also believed ceremony and pageantry appealed to masses, many of whom could not read.  He saw himself as their protector from the more “intellectual” Puritans.  His parliamentarian opponents saw England I think, in terms of institutions, and these institutions for them were the guarantee of the people’s liberties.  Both sides saw the same picture from different perspectives, and different aspects of the picture had different meanings for them.

Among the issues at stake:

Should something be considered legal if it is within the letter but not necessarily the spirit of the law?  Is the letter or the spirit of the law a better guarantee of liberty?

To understand this question, the issue at hand was Charles’s refusal to rule with Parliament, and his collection of the ‘Ship’s Tax.’  Being an introvert and socially awkward, I think Charles hated Parliament.  He did not hate every MP, but he did hate the crowd, the glad-handing, the politicking of it all.  Charles lacked people skills. It was just so much easier, on a number of levels, for him to rule alone without Parliament’s help.  As king, he was not required to call Parliament at all, except when he wanted new taxes.
Charles tried to keep expenses down but every government needs money at some point.  The ‘Ship’s Tax’ was a law still on the books from a few generations prior, but it had fallen into disuse.  It was used as a war-time measure to raise money when under the threat of invasion.   The last time it had been collected was back in the days when Elizabeth used it as a special measure to help prepare defense against the Spanish Armada.  Charles resurrected the tax.  Technically it was not a ‘new’ tax, for it had been collected before.  But Charles was using the tax as a means of general, not special revenue, and he did so to avoid calling for Parliament’s approval for any new taxes.  Charles was within the letter, but not the spirit of the law.  The tax was not “new” in the sense that it had once been collected, albeit with a different purpose in mind.  But Charles revived the tax not under threat of invasion, but as a loophole to avoid Parliament altogether.
By definition, can the king be a traitor?  If so, what would he have to do to merit that approbation?  If one conceives of the king personally embodying England itself then the answer is no.  But if one sees the king as a steward over something outside of himself, then it becomes a possibility.  Charles obviously viewed himself in the former sense, and Parliament the latter.  But at the time, no consensus existed on this question.

Should a bad, or ineffective king, be given complete loyalty?  Does the power of the king depend on how he rules, or on his office?

In the end, Parliament put Charles on trial for treason.  He had, they claimed, made war on his own people and trampled on the Constitution.  Furthermore, he had lied to them and negotiated with the Scots to invade on his behalf, while negotiating in supposed good faith with Parliament.  But the Parliament that tried Charles was not the full Parliament.  The army booted out those whom they suspected that Charles bought off, including the whole House of Lords.  Parliament may have the power to try the king, but was this Parliament?  Charles, at the trial, refused to enter a plea for this reason.  He argued that while “a power” faced him, law did not, which the following clip illustrates. . .

Charles never actually had a trial.  When he refused to enter a plea Parliament found him guilty “in abstentia” (though of course it did not take 2:30 as in the movie clip!).  Though I personally think that Parliament had a good case against Charles, they forced the issue and gave Charles back some dignity and legitimacy when they did not use the full Parliament to put him on trial.

At the end of this week we assigned lawyers to prosecute and defend Charles, as well as witnesses for the defense and prosecution.  I hope the students will have fun with our own mini ‘mock-trial’ and come away with a greater understanding of England during the mid-1600’s.  But as we will discuss next week, the past is not wholly “past.”  Our own ‘War on Terror’ has raised many of the same questions that faced the English.  Should torture ever be used, as Charles did, in time of war?  How far does the power of the president extend in war time?  Bush, for example, defended his extensive wire-tapping as a necessary war-time measure even if it was in a distinctly grey constitutional area, as this article notes.
These are many of the same dilemmas, in an obviously different context, that the English dealt with in 1650.  I hope students will make the connections.
Dave Mathwin
*Observe, for example, how in Shakespeare’s “Henry V” the kings of France and England call each other “Brother France,” and “Brother England.”

Why Classicists should like Pro-Wrestling

by Dave Mathwin

If one said that our modern political scene resembled the spectacle of pro-wrestling, few might object to the statement. Indeed, I have never cared much for following the daily grind of politics, but I can see how it matters–even though I think many vastly overrate it. But I have never understood why anyone would like pro-wrestling. If we all know that it is essentially staged, and “fake,” why bother? The theater of it all is so obvious, yet people react to it so strongly. So too, our political discourse often seems so often cast in such stark terms, and who can say that this benefits us in any way?

Time for a confession . . . though I teach at a classical school, I have a hard time entering into most Greek drama. Aristophanes is fun, and I feel that I “get” Sophocles to a certain extent. But Euripides, and especially Aeschylus, have always seemed odd and distant. The action, the acting (those masks–how strange they seem to me), and the chorus take on such outsized proportions that the plays seems to offer no avenue to enter into the story. The characters almost become Ideas in awkward human form. Here stands “Rage,” there goes “Justice,” and so on.

But the Greek’s founded western civilization. They produced spectacular achievements in philosophy, science, architecture, and the like. So, Greek drama must be “high culture,” on par with these other elements of their civilization . . . ? If the Greeks are not being “lazy” with their dramatic works, we should consider whether or not “high culture” must always be subtle and refined like the Parthenon.*

In an intriguing essay Roland Barthes writes that,

What is thus displayed for the public [in pro-wrestling] is the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice. Wrestling presents man’s suffering with all the amplification of tragic masks. The wrestler who suffers in a hold which is reputedly cruel offers an excessive portrayal of Suffering. . . . This is why all the actions which produce suffering are particularly spectacular . . . Suffering which appeared without intelligible cause would not be understood. . . . suffering appears as inflicted with emphasis and conviction, for everyone must see not only that he suffers, but also and above all understand why he suffers.

. . . There is here the paroxysm of meaning in the style of antiquity, which can only recall the heavily underlined intentions in Roman triumphs.

From Mythologies, pp. 19-21

Leave it to a French intellectual to use the phrase “paroxysm of meaning” when discussing pro-wrestling. But still–here I discovered why so many could know that pro-wrestling is “fake” and still enjoy it. Lots of people enjoy Greek drama too. Barthes writes earlier in the same essay that,

The function of grandiloquence is indeed the same as that of ancient theater, where principle, language, and props (masks and buskins) concurred in the exaggeratedly visible explanation of a Necessity. . . . Each sign in wrestling is therefore endowed with an absolute clarity, since one must always understand everything on the spot. As soon as the opponents enter the ring, the public is overwhelmed with the obviousness of the roles.

Mythologies, pp. 16-17

At least in the Greek plays I have read, the audience clearly did not go to see a “plot twist,” or subtle character analysis. The action unfolds as the audience expects. Even the dilemmas for the characters have a structural rather than internal or personal character. Everything remains on the surface.

Our last four presidents (Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump), two Democrats and two Republicans, have rarely been subject to shades of grey analysis–especially Obama and most especially Trump.

For many in the print news media at least, Trump has the obvious role of villain. His hair, demeanor, speech, etc. are characterized in outsized terms. His every action must have sinister undertones. Some others see him in outsized heroic terms, even the acclaimed Eric Metaxas (whose biography on Bonhoeffer garnered much acclaim) wrote a children’s book entitled Donald Drains the Swamp, which casts President Trump in a mythically heroic role.

Given these observations, a few options present themselves.

The first could encourage us . . . many have lamented the decline of our discourse evident in increased polarization and lack of critical thinking in the media. But the Greeks did much the same thing with their public “media” in theaters, and they were not barbarians. Maybe we overstate the danger posed by our current discourse, just as cultural critics who lament the existence of pro-wrestling (and probably love Greek drama) should take another look at the various spectacles of our national life.

A problem with this interpretation, however, is that our culture is divided as to who is the villain, and who is the hero. But perhaps the Greeks were more divided than we might think. Just because they had plays doesn’t mean everyone loved them or agreed with their interpretations. Thucydides, for example, gives us plenty of evidence of a divided Athenian body politic.

A more negative interpretation would not focus on the lack of subtlety or nuance in our language, or divisions in our country–serious though they are. What I fear instead is that we don’t express our mythic loves and hates in mythic terms, and this leads to confusion and a lack of stasis in our culture. Our ships pass in the night nearly all the time. That is, we cannot and should not avoid our metaphysical reactions to certain policies or events, but in Greek drama and pro-wrestling, the language and structure is metaphysical, and thus, perfectly clear.

Perhaps our most obvious example of this involves our discussion of immigration. All of our discussions about the economic costs and benefits of increased or decreased immigration do nothing to convince anyone, because they fail to address the deep subtext. Those that favor more immigration really mean to advocate for

  • A world where individual is seen as the key building block of society, and the empowerment of individual choice should triumph group solidarity.
  • Immigrants are often seen as the underdogs, and so more open immigration supports the underdog
  • Having a free market should mean free labor, and the more movement of labor allowed, the healthier and more productive the market will be (which is why libertarians favor more open immigration).

Those who seek more restrictions on immigration really seek to

  • Prioritize the concept of a ‘national’ or local family’ and culture over that of the individual.**
  • Put more of a focus on what happens inside our borders than outside (which is why non-interventionists in foreign policy tend towards wanting less immigration).
  • Create a world where law and boundaries have real meaning and are not just arbitrary, i.e. good fences create good neighbors.

So poor has our discourse become on this issue, that both sides have devolved into nearly equally untenable positions: “Build a wall,” or “open borders.” The first option, at least in how it is understood in symbolic terms, proclaims that only a societal core should exist, that virtues such as hospitality cannot exist within that core. The second proclaims that no boundaries have any moral purpose, that borders–be they physical, cultural, or behavioral, have no place in society, despite the fact that every culture since the beginning of time has had them.

As usual, one gains perspective by not by discussing the ‘thing’ in question, but by something related to it. Maybe the next time you disagree with someone on a political issue, maybe try discussing instead whether or not you prefer Hulk Hogan or Ric Flair, and see where that takes you.

Dave

*Another possibility exists, one that I will not explore in depth here, and that is that our division of “high” and “low” culture has no real merit. Or, perhaps the Greeks would have admitted that their drama was “lowbrow,” and we just think it highbrow because it is old.

Going to a Shakespeare play today is quite a “high culture” event most of the time, but Shakespeare has many “low brow” moments in his plays. Of course, one could double back and say that “high” culture needs sprinklings of “low” moments to make it real and tangible, and avoid the danger of pure abstraction.

If we follow the bouncing ball, we might wonder if “low-brow” culture often is more conservative in nature. Or at least, it does not attempt to deconstruct anything.

However we think of these question, I acknowledge that the issue is not as simple as the post above might seem to make it.

A Cronyism Dilemma

by Dave Mathwin

A friend of mine related that he had begun to contemplate retirement.  He wanted to teach about another 10 years or so and then thought about opening a small barbershop.  He reasoned that, having spent almost the entirety of his teaching career in one small town, he would hypothetically know a large percentage of the population.  The barber shop need not be a scheme to make his fortune, so much as a pleasant way to stay connected to the townspeople.

He did some research and to his horror discovered that between the mandated schooling, permitting, and licensing requirements forced upon one by Pennsylvania, he would be in the red $20,000 before he plunked down his first rent check on the property.

All this just to have “permission” from the state to cut hair.

He abandoned his retirement plans.

Often we think of regulations as the little guy limiting the power of the big guy.  But sometimes wealthy companies are the ones who favor regulations because they are the only ones who can afford it.  Regulations can serve as a way to limit competition.  This kind of “crony-capitalism” is possibly an extreme example, yet many have noted the vast increases recently in the number of jobs that need state permits, licenses, and so on.  In these polarized political times, this is an issue Republicans and Democrats could unite on.  Republicans could talk about fostering individual initiative.  Democrats could talk about limiting the reach of big corporations.  It’s a win-win for both sides.  One problem is that these regulations come largely at the state level and not the federal level.  Few people pay much attention to state politics anymore (including myself), and so creating pressure for change would require more patience and diligence.

I thought about this issue while reading the “Aristocrats and Semi-Aristocrats” chapter in R.G. Starr’s Economic and Social Growth in Early Greece.  He mentions that the city-state system got its beginnings when aristocrats came together to try and combine their power.  Of course, this same city-state system would eventually significantly limit the power of the aristocracy in Greece.  This seems counter-intuitive. Why did this happen?

Some see an “aristocracy” in the age that Homer describes.  Starr rightly disagrees.  Certainly one can see a social hierarchy in The Iliad, but not I think, an aristocracy in the sense the word usually carries.  True, Odysseus was king of Ithaca and had some men bound to serve him militarily like medieval lords.  Odysseus tried to escape the Trojan War by pretending to be insane.  It was not, however, that fact that he plowed land that gave him away, but that he would not plow over his son.  Odysseus was a farmer in ways that a typical aristocrat never would have dreamed.

By “aristocracy” we mean an established code of behavior and dress that sets one apart from the rest of the population.  Without some kind of population concentration, one cannot have an aristocracy in the truest sense of the word.  This concentration allows for more accentuation of difference.  In Odysseus’ world you have him as king and then everyone else.  But, bring aristocrats together and you can have stratified layers–“Aristocrats and Semi-Aristocrats.”

The initial coming together of aristocrats naturally did increase their power, as Athens’ literally “Draconian” law code evidences (the name comes from an aristocrat named Draco).  But shortly after this apparent victory their power began to erode, eventually ending up with a fairly radical democracy a century and a half after Draco.

Many reasons exist for this shift, I’m sure.  I feel that one of them has to do with the nature of aristocratic stratification.  Distinguishing oneself by birth has never been quite satisfactory in almost any aristocratic society.  Certainly birth alone never quite worked for the Greeks.  Their ideals called for achieving glory for oneself via striving and competition.  Naturally, these aristocrats would seek for allies in this competitive world, even including the “average Joe.”

But be careful, aristocrats.  The average Joe’s outnumber you, and they eventually took over the competition and established the possibility of “arete” for all.  Something similar happened in Rome.  From about 500-200 B.C. an aristocracy largely ran Rome quite effectively by most measures.  Again, the story has complexity, but the aristocracy began to decline when their competitiveness no longer had a foreign outlet.  Their competition against each other naturally led to their enlistment of the commoners for allies.  A vast network of clients & patrons formed.  By the time Octavian triumphed about 100 years after this process began in earnest, the aristocracy had essentially killed themselves off in fratricidal warfare–a war made possible in part by their enlistment of the common man.

We assume that Rome’s emperors continued aristocratic dominance.  But the Emperors, much like the early Roman kings, tended to side with the “people” and rule in their name.  Rome’s aristocracy led the revolution that exiled the Tarquin kings in their early history.  The worst of Rome’s emperors, like Caligula and Nero, did many of their worst deeds to the senatorial class.  Of course many others abused their power in various ways.  Ending the power of the aristocracy meant the creation of, in the end, an even great power.

Such are the dilemmas of politics.

The decline of the Greek aristocracy did not lead to the kind of absolute rule Rome experienced.  But . . . without the healthy tension between democratic and aristocratic ideas that existed in the time of Pericles, Athenian democracy acquired a kind of absolute power of its own in the form of its laws.  The death of Socrates serves as ‘Exhibit A’ of this transition.

For the sake of my friend and many others like him, I hope for an end to crony-capitalism.  As to what power we will need to dislodge it, I cannot say.  As to whether or not the trade-off will be worth it . . . that too we cannot say for sure.

Such are the dilemmas of politics.

 

Dave

 

 

 

11th/12th Grade: An Ideal Republic

by Dave Mathwin

Greetings,

We started off the year by reading some excerpts from St. Augustine’s City of God to examine how we are defined by our loves.  This “definition” holds true for civilizations, states, and individuals.

Our first major work that we will spend significant time will be Plato’s Republic, one of his earlier and perhaps most significant works.

Plato grew up in Athens and experienced the decline and fall of Athens as a result of the Peloponnesian War.  Not only did they lose the war, the character of their democratic practice changed, and not long after their defeat they execute Socrates (Plato’s mentor) for impiety.  All of this must have shaken Plato to his core, and he uses this psychological disruption to examine what went wrong.  Clearly Athens’ foundation must have been faulty for it to crumble so quickly under stress.  What purpose should government’s serve?  How should they best accomplish this?  These questions drove Plato’s thoughts throughout the Republic.

We will look at the early books of The Republic next week.

Socrates begins the dialog by assuming that people and governments naturally desire justice.  But his companions immediately challenge this and make the following arguments:

  • People give lip service to justice, but really what everybody wants is to practice injustice to their own advantage and get away with it, and they want their country to do the same.
  • Even if people seek justice, it will only be for show.  People will pursue it for a good reputation, or as a bargaining chip on future actions.

Thus, people don’t want justice, so it cannot form the foundation of any state.  It won’t work, because it won’t be built for those who live in it.  The most we can hope for is to limit the desire and practice of injustice.

Before we think these arguments harsh, let us examine them.

As to point 1, who among us has not gone to the grey areas of not being courteous in traffic, or dropped something and not picked it up, because “we were in a hurry.”  We expect to get away with these actions — we justify them by our own self-interest.  According to us, it is in fact “just” that do these things.

As to point 2, some research has shown that when people perform a moral act, they then feel entitled to do an immoral one in exchange.  The moral act “paid” for the transgression.  The fact that many of these “exchanges” involve “small” sins is beside the point.  I recall a recent example in my own life where, when driving I let a couple into my lane, but then the light went yellow before I could cross the intersection.  I remember distinctly thinking to myself (as I went through the intersection on yellow-red) that, given my kindness, I “deserved” to go through the light.  Perhaps I am not alone.

Socrates counters that even our bad actions are often an attempt to seek justice, however skewed that version of justice might be.  So I “deserved” to cross the intersection, or we believe that “being in a hurry” makes it just that I run the light, or what have you.  So justice remains a central concern. We can’t escape it, as our sins bear witness to it.  But at this point the dialog shifts.  Socrates supposes that, as a state is larger than an individual, we will see justice writ larger if we look at the state instead of individuals.  So the key to understanding justice lies in understanding the state.  If we want to understand the state, we must imagine a world where no state exists that we might see how it should be built from the ground up.  When we see the state in this way, we will see the true nature of justice.

Plato has an expansive definition of justice.  We tend to think of punishing right and wrong.  But we can go further–justice “happens” when all is rightly ordered, when we can say that peace has been established.  A just man will have rightly ordered loves and affections.  A just state will not really even need laws, for just people govern themselves.

Understanding Plato involves entering into a pre-modern understanding of the world.  We in the modern world usually tend to think that governments and societies are for us to mold and shape according to our needs and desires.  The world comes to us as series of malleable situations.  What matters most is that we agree on how to mold the clay of our society.

Ancient/medieval societies differed in their perception of the universe.  They believed that human society should be ordered around a pre-existing and hierarchical reality.  Life meant living into an already existing reality.  Perhaps some of you may have said to your children, “The men of our family don’t act like this.”  In other words, you expect your children to live into a reality, a habit or pattern, that predates them that they are not free to alter.  This is a modified form of the pre-modern view–modified because the Johnson family still created this reality.  For the Egyptians, Aztecs, Medievals, many Greeks and Romans, and so on, the structure of their society came from God/the gods.

Next week we will continue to explore these themes, and our journey will lead us into all sorts of interesting places, such as art, music, and education.

Until then,

Dave

The Definitive Absence

by Dave Mathwin

I have always thought, along with C.V. Wedgwood and others, that Charles I got a raw deal in the aftermath of the English Civil War (1642-49). Leaving aside the matter of his personal guilt, I can see no good legal argument for Parliament having the authority to put him to death after their victory. But as many have remarked, as sympathetic a figure as Charles cuts at his trial and the end of his life, one finds it hard to embrace him as king.

In discussing this, many pay attention to the combination of poor decisions, occasional overreaching, ideological and religious foment, and bad luck during his reign. Some perhaps mention that in addition to the above factors, Charles simply lacked the ability to “look the part” of King of England, and this I think gets more to the root of the issue.

But why would this be? Charles had a personal piety and beliefs in tune with the vast majority of his countrymen. His real leadership flaws should not have risen to level of revolution and the loss of his head. After all, he had certain strengths as a leader as well. Something else must have been going on within England, perhaps even on a subconscious level.

A hint lies in the coronation celebrations, or lack thereof, in the reigns of Elizabeth I and the unfortunate Charles. Several accounts exist of Elizabeth’s coronation procession into London, the first from an Italian ambassador:

The houses on the way were all decorated; there being on both sides of the street wooden barricades, on which the merchants and artisans of every trade campe in long black gowns lined with hodds of red and black cloth . . . with all the emblems and banners–it made a very fine show.  Owing to the rain there was much mud, but the people had made preparations, by placing sand and gravel in front of their houses.

[He estimates perhaps 1000 horses in the procession], behind which came the queen, in an open litter, trimmed to the ground in gold brocade.  She herself dressed in royal robe rich in golden color, and over her head a coif of gold. Her crown was plain, with no gold lace, but studded with precious gems.

Another commented,

Onlookers noted, “For in all her passage she did not only shew her most gracious love toward the people in general, but also privately if the baser personages had either offered her any flowers or the like as a sign of their goodwill, she most gently staid her chariot and her their requests.

Thomas Mulcaster [Ass’t to the Lord Mayor of London?] added, “London was showed a most wonderful spectacle of a noble-hearted princess toward her most loving people, and the people’s exceeding comfort in so worthy a sovereign.

Holinshed’s Chronicles notes [I have updated the spelling]

For in all her passage she did not only shew her most gracious love toward all the people in general, but also privately if the baser personages had either offered her grace any flowers or any other sign of their good will, she most gently, to the common rejoicing of all onlookers, staid her chariot and heard their requests.

David Bergeron comments that,

The whole report creates the unmistakable impression that this queen in the golden litter forms very much a part of the action, one of the actors in the pageant, part of the theatrical experience.

English Civic Pageantry, 1558-1642, p. 20

Accounts exist of Elizabeth’s own words:

I thank my Lord Mayor, his brethren, and you all.  And whereas your request is that I should continue your good lady and queen, be ye ensured that I will be as good unto you as ever any queen unto her people.  No will in me can lack, neither do I trust that I lack any power. And persuade yourselves, that for the safety and quietness of you all, I will not spare, if need be, to spend my blood, God thank you all. 

As for Charles’ coronation, we have the following from the Earl of Pembroke, 25 of May, 1626:

My Lord,
Whereas your lordship and the rest of that Court now formerly directed by letters from the right honourable Earl Marshall, to prepare and erect in several places within the city various and sundry pageants for the fuller and more significant expression of your joys upon his Majesty, and his royal consorts intended entrance through your fair city: His Majesty having now allowed his said purpose, and given me Command to signify such to you, it may please your Lordship to take notice therof by these, as also remove the said Pageants, which besides the particular charge they accrue, do choke and hinder the passage of such as in coaches or carriages that have occasion to go up and down.  

Charles’ desire to save money actually was mostly moot, as many of the preparations had already been made for his procession. Workers would still need paid. Perhaps Charles had no knowledge of this, but I think not. Rather, Charles, unlike Elizabeth, could not force himself to go through with the public spectacle of coronation. Perhaps this was his introverted and private personality. Or perhaps his sense of royal dignity was so acute as to be intensely personal, and thus misguided.

Either way . . . Elizabeth clearly understood how to embody what it meant to be queen, and she communicated that understanding in a publicly meaningful way. By meaningful, I mean liturgical. One sees this throughout her reign. She mastered the art of the “royal progress.” Theatrical and symbolic encounters, such as when a child might present her a book and a flower, or a peasant giving her a trowel, or whatever, she made look completely natural and appropriate. This I am convinced is the key difference between Charles and Elizabeth. Charles modeled himself on Elizabeth in certain respects and even in certain laws (i.e., the Ship’s Tax). But it all fell flat. Charles could not embody and transmit the meaning of his kingship effectively to enough of his people.

We see this difference in portraits of the two monarchs. Elizabeth revels in overtly outward display.

To many today she no doubt appears ridiculous. Indeed, it seems that Elizabeth Tudor hardly appears at all. But “Elizabeth I” is in full view, and the English responded to her.

Scouring Google, I think Charles seems to be holding something back in every image I saw.

And . . .

Perhaps those like me feel sympathy for Charles even if we might not like him very much because his portraits reveal something of the man that was Charles Stuart. But where is Charles I?

As for his son Charles II, say what you will, but he certainly knew how to project, both as a young man, and later in life.

The first image might let Charles Stuart Jr. bleed through a little bit, but it is at least a more likeable person than Charles I that we see. As he got older, he learned to be more fully Charles II. Alas for Charles I–during his reign much less religious persecution existed than under Elizabeth, and he certainly had far superior morals than his son, all to no avail. His morally reprobate son was far more popular and effective as king.

I think many miss a central lesson we can draw from Elizabeth and the Stuart kings: if one can’t communicate outwardly the meaning of leadership through symbol and liturgy, then people will be driven inward in the fraught and dangerous realm of ideas and ideology.

In his Myth and Reality Marcel Eliade made an observation about modern art that struck me with great force. He notes the decline of a common symbolic language and forms in the wake of the Reformation, and perhaps especially after the Enlightenment. The lack of a common outward symbolic language–the Enlightenment called such things “superstitions”–leads then to a destruction of a common visual language in the arts. Eliade writes,

Beginning with painting, this destruction of language has spread to the novel, and just recently [writing in 1963] to the theater. In some cases there is a real annihilation of the established artistic universe. Looking at some recent canvases, we get the impression that the artist wished to make a ‘tabula rasa’ of the entire history of painting. There is more than destruction, there is a reversion to chaos . . . *

I found Eliade’s book in turns deeply illuminating and frustrating. But one only needs to think of cubism, dadaism, Jackson Pollack’s work, and some of Picasso as well, to see the force of his statement. Perhaps his greatest insight came with his assertion that the rise of psychotherapy directly accompanied the destruction of forms in the art world. With outward and visible avenues of meaning eliminated, we retreated inward for answers. But Eliade points out rightly that we are still following the mythological tropes. We still seek the lost paradise, (the Romantic movement) we still seek to deal with original sin (for the SJW’s this is ‘prejudicial conduct’), and we still seek the end of history (communists and other utopians). Without the common language, however, our fights will grow only deeper. Without something transcendent outside the system for us to reference, we will have to put all of our eggs into our earthly baskets.

Both Presidents Trump and Obama understand/stood very well, consciously or no, how to embody certain symbolic types. No one much cared how much money Elizabeth spent if she fit the part so well. So too, Mitt Romney could never equal Obama’s symbolic value. If Democrats want to beat Trump, they will need someone who can equal Trump’s archetypal value to the culture, even if it is a different archetype. Presidents Clinton and Reagan also excelled at politically embodying the “meaning of America” for their eras. Whitewater/Lewinsky and Iran-Contra might have sunk other leaders with less symbolic/liturgical footing with the culture at large.

Recently a government sponsored arts festival in Germany ran for a week, with its basic message being that, “European democracy is, and always has been, racist construct based on power and prestige,” later declaring that, “wretchedness is the basis of all art.” Such sentiments have a lot in common with the conspiracy theories of those like Alex Jones. Conservatives like myself who lament such things have to take Eliade’s insight seriously. The German ‘festival’ (which sounds like something from “Sprockets”), Jones, and others testify to the loss of a common narrative, a common language made manifest in the culture we can all adhere to. I am wondering if an Elizabeth I or even a Charles II** might emerge, if not in America, then hopefully somewhere else.

Dave

**Eliade could have mentioned movies as well. Think of all of the grand epic films of the 1950’s, with their oversized sets and out-sized acting. Charlton Heston has something in common with Elizabeth I. In The Magnificent Seven, the inner life of the heroes is not important and not explored. Charles Bronson’s character–rugged individualist that he is–knows he is not the hero. Fast forward a few years to the Guns of Navarone, where David Niven’s character is played with a sense of restraint and knowing detachment (though Peck’s character rebukes him for this). The common forms still hold, but we see possible cracks in the foundation. Just about 10 years after Bronson’s turn in The Magnificent Seven, his (and Donald Sutherland’s) knowing smirks in The Dirty Dozen testify to the imminent collapse of the common forms. Of course in Europe this shift probably happened decades earlier.

Here I do not seek to romanticize the 1950’s or any other previous era. Every time and place has its problems. I just seek to point out the differences.

**For the record, I have no great love for either monarch. Elizabeth persecuted many Catholics, and Charles II would have been hard for me to respect, though I acknowledge he was popular for a reason. What we need is someone like them whom we can rally around not in terms of his policies but as a symbol. Many of the best monarchs understood this intuitively, as thinking “symbolically” was part and parcel of their culture.

The Social Justice Warrior and the Meaning of Creation

by Dave Mathwin

Before I write anything I should say that anyone familiar with the ideas of Dr. Jordan Peterson or Jonathan Pagaeu will note their presence all over what follows.  My debt to them is deep in this post.  My thanks to them both.

Some time ago I had fun debating with a colleague about Russia’s move to restrict the freedom’s of Jehovah’s Witnesses.  No western commentator approved the move.  Everyone thought that this added to the examples of how Russia is lurching away from the West, is authoritarian, is evil, and so on.  Even Trump lodged a protest.  Now, while I happen to agree with Russia’s move (or mostly agree), I acknowledge that my position is far from a slam-dunk.

It seems impossible for us to imagine society working without more or less complete freedom of religion.  But, every society up until quite recently, from ancient Egypt down through the Scientific Revolution, limited freedom of religion.  Somehow their societies functioned just fine.  Even here and now we restrict the liberties of Jehovah’s Witnesses in some ways, along with other religions.  Would we give “freedom of religion” to satanists who sacrificed chickens next door?

Anyway, Jehovah’s Witnesses, for example, do not allow for blood transfusions.  When one of their children comes to the hospital needing a transfusion, the state assumes temporary guardianship if the parents refuse to allow for proper treatment.  The child receives a transfusion and lives.  We have no problem with restricting the religious liberties of Jehovah’s Witnesses in this respect.  Russia just takes our approach a bit further. The difference between us is one of degree and not kind.  In fact Russia stated that the blood-transfusion issue particularly bothered them.  Russia may not even have the guardianship laws we do in the U.S., making the possibility of children dying in their hospitals potentially a genuine reality.

The point being, every society has to draw a line somewhere.  Every society must distinguish between order, chaos and the acceptable margin.  Civilization could not exist otherwise.  Maybe Russia has erred in judgment.  But all must acknowledge that freedom has limits, and maybe those limits should have different boundaries in different places depending on the culture and context.  As Peter Augustine Lawler noted, many of those who champion a homogenous amorality concerning religion get quite judgmental regarding “obesity, smoking, alcohol, and seatbelts.”

Every society has a doctrine of creation that flows from their creation story, and this story informs every society in how they will deal with the boundary between order and chaos. Genesis deals with this quite directly and more clearly than any other I have read.  In one chapter we see the following:

  • The existence of a formless void far too vast for us to begin to understand.  We are finite, and cannot comprehend the infinite (some brilliant mathematicians have gone insane trying to do this).  If the vast scope of the created order defies imagination and numbs the mind, how can we begin to understand God Himself?
  • God creating differentiation, separating light from dark, the sea from dry land, plants from animals, and so on.
  • God creating mankind in His own image–differentiating them as male and female–inviting them to participate in this process of dominion and creating differentiation themselves  In chapter 2, for example, we see Adam naming the animals.
  • It is this very order, then, that allows for us to understand our place in the world and begin to know God.

The Mosaic law extends this in a variety of ways.  God called the Israelites to differentiate in the foods they ate, the clothes they wore, and of course, in the God they worshipped.  And yet, sprinkled throughout the Old Testament God gives reminders that the laws He gave and the differentiation he required were not absolute.  One thinks of the visions of Isaiah or Ezekiel, for example.  Often we see God and/or the psalmists tell us that He does not desire sacrifice, but then of course tells us to sacrifice all the same.  David understands this tension perfectly in Psalm 51, one of the most important psalms for the Church.

The Incarnation destroyed some of the old paradigms and created new ones.  Jesus breaks down the differentiation between Jew and Gentile, slave and free.  He destroys the dominion of sin and death.  He creates, or perhaps re-creates, a new kind of humanity.  The “chaos” outside of our categories invaded and transformed the world.  But . . . He still left us with “categories.”  We still have the Apostles as the foundation of the Church (Eph. 2:20), the canon, the liturgy, the bishops, and so on.

In his recent writing and in his numerous interviews, Jonathan Pageau discusses the relationship between the core of society, its margins, and the chaos beyond (the linked article is a fascinating discussion of the role of zombies in our culture, and a look at how the Church has dealt with the core and margin in its iconography).  Every society has a core of values and behaviors that shape culture, social interaction, politics, and so on.  So too each society has people and behavior on the margins, and the realm of nonsense and chaos beyond.  Total devotion to complete order would suffocate us.  If we let anything go at any time you have (to use Pageau’s phrase) “the flood”–a complete absence of differentiation that would destroy us in short order.

Each element has its place.  Generally speaking, the chaos exists as a warning.*  We can’t go there and live.  No one can see the face of God. The margins serve the dual purpose of challenging the core and thereby strengthen it at the same time.  Sometimes the margins penetrate the core and find ways to enlarge it and reshape in a healthy way.  The margin reminds us as well that the order we created is not absolute.  Societies need their margins and need to respond to them.

Not to stereotype too dramatically, but usually the artistic, creative groups in society occupy the margins.  To say this is “where they belong” is no insult.  That is where they are most effective.  We need only think of how certain musicians, comedians, and actors helped with the Civil Rights movement, for example.  But, would we want Picasso or Miles Davis as our congressmen?  What would happen to our arts and music?  Unfortunately at the moment, the margins of society, especially those in favor of radically different understandings of sexuality and gender, seek to become the core via judicial or executive fiat (and not the legislative process), and to enforce the ethics of the margin upon the mainstream.

This flipping of roles will work out badly for everyone.  The margins have no idea how to maintain a stable core–their whole business involves continually exploring new possibilities.  The core, ousted from their traditional role, will serve us very poorly as the prodding margin.  Just imagine a Sousa march as radical, avant-garde culture.  The end result will either result in another flood or a swing toward stifling authoritarianism, just as in France ca. 1791, or Germany in 1933, or perhaps even in Athens in 404 B.C.**

We have lived with democracy too long to see the nose on our face.  We cannot comprehend why others, including Russia, might feel apprehensive about adopting our system and our values wholesale. Democracy has a time-tested ability to plow through core traditions with extreme rapidity.  One need only look at how quickly our sexual ethics have gone from thinking about homosexual rights in the late 1990’s to state mandated speech regarding gender in about 20 years.  Perhaps we might think of democracy akin to an Italian sports car.  A sight to behold, powerful, able to move quickly in any direction.  At the same time, such cars are temperamental, break easily, and shouldn’t be driven by just anyone.

This remarkable adaptivity, however, may save us in the end.  Maybe the margin and the core can trade places rather quickly.  We have gone through transitions in the past and at least mostly righted the ship.  Hopefully soon we’ll have Aristophanes making us laugh again, and we’ll get Brad Lauhaus off the perimeter and back to grabbing rebounds on the low block.  All would be right with the world.

Dave

*I believe it is in Mere Christianity where C.S. Lewis mentions that many atheists or agnostics have no clue what it means to say, “If God would only show Himself plainly to all, then I would believe,” or something to that effect.  Lewis rightly points out that when the playwright steps on stage, the play is over.  God’s full revelation of Himself would overwhelm everything.  There would be no time for “belief.”

**Examples of this abound everywhere, especially on campuses around the country.  Just recently Brandeis University pulled the plug on a play by one of their own students about Lenny Bruce . . . for being too controversial.  Or read what happened to Prof. Bret Weinstein (an acknowledged supporter of Bernie Sanders, and far from a conservative) at Evergreen State University.

Finally, some might say that I contradict myself.  I favor (sort of) Russia putting limits on Jehovah’s Witnesses, while I am critical of those on the left imposing their own limits.  To clarify, I see a difference.

  • The actions of Russia are taken to reinforce their core.  Russia has a tremendously long history, and a religious history very different from our own.  We have a hard time understanding this in America, as we build off an abstract concept of rights divorced from culture, whereas Russia builds first from culture.
  • The actions of the progressive left seek to radically alter the core with ethics and practices from the margin.

Russia’s action may go too far, but fundamentally it changes very little about who they are as a people. Our recent changes are an attempt to radically shift what our core is, and introduces uncertainty about what we should be, which is dangerous to a society.

“It was . . . Soap Poisoning!”

by Dave Mathwin

Abstract logic is the weapon of choice of most teenagers. Certainly this tool can intoxicate, but . . . it can often be fool’s gold.

For example, a parent tells their teenage driver to be home from a night out with friends at no later than 10:30. The teen arrives home at 10:50 and shrugs, “It’s not that big of a deal.” The teen will often attempt to atomize the parental rebuke with logic: “It’s just 20 minutes. if I was 20 minutes late coming home from work you wouldn’t care, or 20 minutes late coming home from school, you wouldn’t care. So to get angry about this particular 20 minutes only shows utter arbitrariness in your distinctions. It is your power, and your power alone to define what constitutes a meaningful 20 minutes is why I am in trouble, and no other reason.”

Ah yes, nothing burns so fiercely in the teenage soul as the apparent arbitrary nature of various parental decisions and distinctions. The teenager may suffer consequences, but they will suffer them rejoicing in their moral superiority. They see, they know the Injustice, and dream that perhaps one day, one day, parents will be struck by a terrible self-knowledge . . .

Reading Murray Edelman’s Constructing the Political Spectacle left me feeling that I was listening to a 16 year-old who thinks he has discovered the secret truth of the universe that somehow everyone over 30 for the last several millennia has missed.

Edelman’s bases his book on the idea that our politics do not reflect an objective reality that we recognize, but a constructed reality made by those in power. Often, politicians will do things to perpetuate their power artificially by creating enemies or crises. We create such things via the terms we use, or the definitions we create. Very skillful politicians construct reality with tone or posture. It seems to me that Edelman believes we are puppets on the strings of language, a fairly standard postmodern perspective.

As an example of his perspective, Edelman discusses the idea of a political crisis through the Cuban Missile Crisis. We called the Russians placing missiles in Cuba a “crisis,” one that nearly triggered war. But we had missiles just as close to Russia as they did to us–many more of them, in fact. Another narrative of seeing the Russians striving for greater global security through strategic parity emerges. Which narrative we pick will depend on which definition we use, and the definitions those in power chose elevated the government’s status. The “Cuban Missile Crisis” was a crisis only because we defined it so–we could have easily chosen other language to create a different reality.

Certainly we have to get below the surface narrative that favors our side, but the equivalency Edelman attempts make sense only in a pure abstraction. In the real world we know that placing missiles under a cloak of deceit (which the Russians did in Cuba) means that we have to see beyond merely where missiles are located and how many each side has. In the same way, we know that when a teenager comes home 20 minutes late from school, and another time comes home 20 minutes late from being out with his friends at night, the difference between these two 20 minutes is hardly arbitrary.

Other problems exist with the book . . .

  • He discusses how political leaders have power in part because of their visibility. They can control the symbols by which they are viewed, which in turn makes them seem more than just figments. But every leader since the dawn of time has been invested with some kind of symbolic/semi-sacred (in some cases fully sacred) authority. Has every civilization simply not had the advantage of getting to Derrida’s philosophy? It seems much more reasonable to assume that these symbolic forms mean something real, and are not just pure manipulations.
  • He discusses how political leaders might create enemies to boost their power, i.e. Wag the Dog. Sure, it can happen sometimes, but some enemies are real. ISIS is not a semantic construction. How would Edelman propose we tell the difference between real and fake enemies?
  • He criticizes the use of semantic and symbolic constructions to achieve collective action. Yes, this can be bad sometimes, but he never reminds us that it can also be done for good ends. I had the suspicion that collective action itself was presumed guilty, but surely we cannot exist apart from some occasional collective action.

As I read my frustration with Edelman grew, and not so much even because I am conservative and every example he used in the book made conservatives (or those with power, such as generals) the bad people for how they used symbols and defined the terms. After all, people can write books that critique conservatives, and I can learn from them. No–my frustration stemmed from the assumptions his arguments made about those on the left, and even himself. Edelman’s thesis leaves us with the following choices:

  • Only bad conservatives know how to wield symbols and construct the political spectacle in their favor, which makes those on the left either blind sheep or slaphappy stupid.
  • Those on the left can construct political realities but not get others to follow very often, which seems to cede much of the high ground to conservatives–maybe their policies really do represent the majority of citizens?– or assume that the great mass of people are dumb and easily manipulated, but only by conservatives (the left must lack the talent?)
  • Every unified political action is nothing more than symbol and word manipulation, which means that those on the right and left are “bad” when they try and do this.
  • Not to mention, Edelman himself becomes “bad” for trying to impose his narrative of definitions and language on me, the innocent reader. “Don’t impose your ‘there is no Narrative’ narrative on me, man. I just want to live and let live.

I have been quite critical of Edelman, but he, like other postmoderns, latches onto an important truth. The teenager has to arrive at a point where they realize that their parents are not gods and that the world they live in–constructed largely by their parents–has many arbitrary elements in them. Applying these insights into society and politics has its place. The Enlightenment modern project needed taken down a notch or two. But the teen can’t stay in a constant critique. He needs to build something, but Edelman gives us no tools for the task.

Andrew Kern of the Circe Institute has a helpful breakdown of different kinds of education. First, there is the Pragmatic education, then the Traditional, then the Wisdom education. Each type, Kern reminds us, is based on faith in something.

  • A Pragmatic education bases itself on the belief that all that is worthy is what can be seen, measured, and useful for his brute survival–food, water, shelter.
  • A Traditional education respects the past and knows that things exist beyond what he can see or measure–his society, or heritage, for one. He believes in the value of this inheritance, and receives the proper training to honor that tradition and to sacrifice for it.
  • A Wisdom education tries to do more, to stand outside the Tradition and ask questions of it. It tries to get at the roots of a society. It can lead one to see faults within the Tradition and hopefully correct it when needed. If the Traditionalist has faith in an unseen inheritance, it is still an earthly oriented inheritance. A Wisdom education believes in something transcendent above all traditions. 

One might think that Edelman gives us wisdom, because of his ability to see through traditions. I disagree. First, true education has to lead us somewhere, and Edelman merely deconstructs. Second, a wisdom education has to involve love, has to involve a giving of oneself to something higher. No societal critique works without roots in love of the Tradition.* I sense nothing of this in Edelman. He gives us logic-chopping straight from the freezer.

But even a “Wisdom” education rooted in love of the Tradition would not fully complete our education. Kern reminds us that there remains a fourth and final stage of education, one that even many Christians miss, just as the Corinthian church in St. Paul’s day missed it. The proof of their failure was their disunity. They used all of their wisdom to fight with each another. Indeed, being able to evaluate a tradition doesn’t mean that we will agree on what is right or wrong about the tradition. Perhaps one might arguably see some of this division of mind present even in Solomon, the wisest of the wise, and the presumed author of the somewhat confusing book of Ecclesiastes.

The final stage of education, then involves something beyond critique, and into the realm of Play, into the great dance of the Triune God, where unity and diversity cohere in the foundation of Being itself, where we are fully united one with another but are never more our own unique selves simultaneously.

Herein lies the Secret of the Gospel, and the answer to Edelman.

Dave

*If we could summarize the basic problems with the political Left and Right, it would be

  • The Right wants to uphold the Tradition with little to no critique of it.
  • The Left simply critiques the Tradition without any love for it (or, if they praise America, they praise it almost exclusively for being able to correct its mistakes–a perpetual motion machine of self doubt, and sometimes, self loathing).

Both sides have something to offer, and both sides often see with one eye closed. As I mentioned elsewhere, the first half of the 20th century shows us the horror that unquestioning love of a Tradition can bring. Since then we see the spiritual and moral vacuum of deconstruction with no place to stand with no map available.