Apologetics Kaboom!

The internet is neat. Right now, at this moment, via a couple links on this blog, you can tune into two very different and yet convergent sets of arguments for why, if you are going to be a Christian, the only reasonable kind of Christian to be is Catholic. Emphasis on “reasonable”, which, for a God who says He is the Logos, is no small thing.

John C Wright, an atheist to Catholic convert, takes up the reasons he went straight to Rome when he was miraculously converted to Christ. He is as coolly logical as they come, and applies logic and philosophy to tease out the truth.

Renee Lin, an Evangelical Protestant to Catholic convert, goes after Protestantism’s soft underbelly of unspoken assumptions and ahistorical fairy tales over on her blog Forge the Roads. In a nice way, of course.  She uses a staggering amount of research to expose the inconsistencies and howlers lurking in both popular and more scholarly Protestant apologetics.

Is this what the New Evangelization looks like? Cool.

 

Thoughts and Observations: Weekend Edition

Bixby Creek Bridge, care of Wikipedia

Mostly just pointing you to other links.

1. In the course of taking the family on our annual camping trip to meet up with my little brother and his family, we drove CA Highway 1 from Santa Cruz to Morro Bay.  Couple observations.

– This world is really beautiful. Even elephant seals look sort of OK framed by the California coast;

– People are really good at building roads. There are a *lot* of death-defying cliff-hugging roads and bridges along Highway 1. Some nuts had to design and then actually build those things – and they pulled it off in style;

– I won’t be willingly moving from California any time soon.

2. Visited Hearst Castle, a place I have never had the least interest in seeing, because the extended family wanted to. Hey, domestic tranquility and all that.  Let’s just go ahead and say it: it is a metaphor for everything that’s gone wrong in America over the last 150 years:

– It’s a monument to what money unencumbered by anything higher than a bloated ego can accomplish;

– All over the buildings and grounds, religious themes are incorporated into the secular pleasure palace because they are old and kind of interesting. The main building is built to look like a church, and just about every facade and room has diptichs, choir stalls, religious statuary, paintings and knick-knacks.  Generations of monks might have prayed for the forgiveness of sins and the salvation of the world in those stalls, but Hearst repurposed them so that Errol Flynn could sit in one and complain about Hearst’s watery martinis;

– The entire point of the buildings ceased to be upon the death of the builder. Once Willy died, his estate couldn’t wait to get rid of it. Ended up giving it to the State of California, which turned it into a tourist attraction that pretty much pays for itself. Now, you lay you money down, and you can look at it – just don’t touch anything, don’t even think about swimming in the pools or riding the trails or sitting in the sitting rooms. Just look.

– All of history, represented by all the stuff Hearst collected, is merely a curiosity to be momentarily gawked at. It’s cool, and all, but means nothing.

It’s a kind of transitional piece, where a man with pretensions to culture could acknowledge religion – Catholicism, really – while simultaneously pushing it aside as a mere curiosity. The next generation could, as a simple matter of taste, ignore it completely.

3. The always interesting Darwin Catholic has a post up about reading and rereading. I’m with Darwin here: the virtues of reading sources (Great Books), of reading good fiction, and of rereading good books in general seem so obvious and natural the mind stumbles over the novelty of trying to express why, like Chesterton’s example of the man asked why he prefers civilization.

4. John C. Wright is at it again, making a manly effort to explain philosophy and what really thinking about something looks like to the masses in his combox and email. It is a think of great beauty and horror: the beauty of seeing truth expounded and defended, and the horror of observing the deformities which – however innocently and even with good intentions – have shaped so many modern minds.

5. Mr. Wright also addresses the topic of skepticism, an issue dear to my heart. He points out that the term ‘skepticism’ is used equivocally to mean both the thorough and logical critique of ideas and assumptions and the emotional predilection toward scoffing at every belief and idea you don’t like. He adds a new and interesting thought: that skepticism as used in the second sense amounts to a failure of imagination. Aristotle somewhere says words to the effect that the sign of a cultured mind is the ability to calmly entertain an idea without believing it true.

6. The Statistician to the Stars takes time off from  explaining and defending Bayes’s theorem (his math-fu is stronger than mine! Like horse stronger than ant!) to explain the usefulness of and logic behind ensembles of models. This, I could understand – good stuff.

7. Last, Mike Flynn writes about science and humanism, enlisting the aid of, among others,  Calvin and Hobbes, Star Trek, LotR, Joni Mitchell, and Hitler in making his points clear. How can you not love that?

Adoration Hour With the Pope

We attended at 8:00 a.m. local time, at this lovely Guadalupe chapel at a local parish:

It was good. Couple thoughts:

– One thing that pleases me to no end is that attending Catholic events in the East Bay (or California generally) is like a trip  to the United Nations, except quieter, cheaper and with fewer Marxists. Being in the Guadalupe chapel tended to slant the crowd Latin American, but still – not white bread America. Which is good.

– I’ve long been amazed at how our Sola Scriptura, Bible-lovin’ separated brethren could read John 6 without some serious cognitive dissonance.  What *do* they imagine Christ is talking about?

– On that topic, I’ve also long been (slightly) curious about why John, of all the Evangelists, leaves out the Institution of the Sacrament from the Last Supper narrative. Recently read Walking with God by Gray and Cavin, which suggests an answer. I’m embarrassed to admit one point the authors raise escaped me – you know, the pedantic Great Books guy – that the writers of scripture come from a very sophisticated story-telling tradition, with its own rules and traditional practices. You know, like every other freaking culture, only more so, as the Israelites are both long-lived and conspicuously devoted to their stories.

Anyway, any sort of even moderately sophisticated reading has to ask: in what context was this text read? What conventions is it following? One convention: the Jewish writers  do not hit you over the head all the time – often they prefer to leave little leaps for the reader, to better engage him and make the story memorable. Gray and Cavin give the example of Abraham’s banishing of Hagar and Ishmael, and the subsequent call for Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Nowhere does account spell out that Abraham had condemned Hagar and Ishmael to death, it merely says he sent them off without supplies or protection, which readers would know meant he intended them to die. God then calls on him to kill Isaac, which the readers would see as reasonable justice for a man who murdered his own son and his mother. God makes it all work out with miracles left and right, sparing Hagar and Ishmael and Isaac, and calling Abraham to greater fidelity and holiness. The context in which this story was read was one in which the children of Abraham know they have failed to keep God’s law, have sinned repeatedly, and yet have been, from Moses on down, repeatedly and miraculously spared what justice would require.

And so on – it’s a good analysis, check it out. In the case of John’s Eucharistic theology, the thrice-repeated insistence by Christ that He is eaten and drunk, and that that Body and Blood are real food and real drink, and that if you do not eat of His Body and drink of His Blood, you will have no life within you, the context in which this was read was – the Mass. By the time John wrote his Gospel, the practice of celebrating the Eucharist by reading Scriptures, hearing a homily, and then sharing in the Bread and Wine had become well-established. John didn’t leave out the Last Supper consecration narrative to denigrate it – he left it out to emphasize it. The hearer of that passage would then see what it means by the actions of the priest right before his eyes. The hearer of the Word is engaged, and the message made more memorable, by not spelling it out in the text, but by letting the liturgical context actualize it.  Since the other 3 Evangelists and Paul, writing earlier, had spelled it out, there was no risk of the connection between the Real Presence at Mass and the Last Supper being missed.

Well, unless you willfully want to miss it.

Another way to Think About Science in Academia

Background: Got to hear a homily by a Jesuit a few weeks back on the reading from Acts covering the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15: 1-31). Those with long experience both in the pews at Mass and with Jesuits know what’s coming next: it was carefully and delicately explained to us lunkheads that the Apostles *overturned* Tradition in light of new developments – that the clear answer of tradition was for the gentile converts to be circumcised and obey all Jewish laws. But that’s not what they did – the *correct* answer was to ignore tradition in light of new developments – the clear evidence of the Spirit working among the gentile converts – and toss tradition and embrace Progress. Therefore, today, when we see the Spirit at work among women seeking ordination, couples of whatever sex shacking up in whatever combinations, and any other “developments”, we should – it was implied – toss tradition and embrace Progress, too.

Ignoring the anachronistic and forced nature of this interpretation – the real issue is pretty clearly whether Christianity is a flavor of Judaism or not, the answer to which question obviates the issue of Jewish Tradition – the argument hinges on the concept of ‘development’. What does this mean? It clearly can’t mean a simple change of opinion – we used to think homosexuality base and sinful, now we (the ‘we’ that count, anyway) think it’s just super, at least as good as being straight, so now we change Church teachings to reflect our new opinion. If this is so, Luther and Calvin, not to mention Dawkins and Hitchens, would like a word with us.  No, if it means anything other than that I get my way and you swallow it and shut up, development means something objective became known, that something ‘developed’ to which you or I as an honest thinker would be compelled by our honesty to admit as true.

So here’s a little thought: the process by which a development can become something that demands our acknowledgement as true can follow roughly 2 paths. We shall here call them the Aristotelian path and the Hegelian path. Playing a starring role along the Aristotelian path is Science. Science can  reasonably demand our conditional assent to its claims  because of our absolute assent to logic, reason and truth. This breathtaking assertion means, in practice, that Science, insofar as it is to validly demand our assent, must conform to the rules of logic and reason. Chiefly, this adherence to logic and reason is expressed in Science’s own internally developed rules of observation.What qualifies as a scientific observation – a data point, if you will – is dependent upon compliance with well-understood rules that, in turn, derive from logic and reason.

The positive aspect of agreeing to conditionally accept the claims of science is that we can be as sure of things in the material world as is possible to the embodied human mind. (Sure enough to successfully build a nuclear power plant, for example.) The downside is this: that the claims of science are necessarily very limited. Turns out that most of what’s interesting in the world does not admit very readily to successful analysis by the scientific method. To get results that can reasonably claim our conditional assent in such fields as psychology, sociology or economics is devilishly difficult, and any such valid claims are going to be, by their nature, very small and limited. Some indispensable things are clearly outside the ken of science entirely – metaphysics, for example.

Yet the disciples of science can’t let it go, and keep pushing ahead in areas of great uncertainty and as if they are not building a house of cards in mid-air. (If this isn’t clear, stop right now and read Cargo Cult Science by Richard Feynman. It’s way worse now than it was 50 years ago when he wrote it.) We lovers of science are honor-bound to call ‘foul!’ whenever we see this happening.

So, have there been new ‘developments’ in, for example, the understanding of human sexuality such that the modern psychologist or sociologist has knowledge both pertinent to the question and unavailable to St. Paul or Dante? Knowledge that our loyalty to reason, logic and truth compel us to accept? The answer is clearly no – if we apply the standards of science. Therefore, we would reject a call to reject the Church’s teachings even if we accept the logic of our Jesuit’s homily.

But there is another approach, and here I tread where one Hegel translator warned me off: he wisely noted that if you ever think you’ve paraphrased Hegel succinctly and clearly, you are wrong.  That said – that I am wrong – here’s what I think Hegel’s approach boils down to in regards to science: you will never understand horses by understanding horse meat. To understand horses – or anything at all – you don’t start with the pieces, you start with an apprehension of the whole, the whole living horse, the horse in its herd, the herd in its environment, the changing herd and changing environment over time. Science in the Aristotelian sense described above is for the little people and their little facts and little lives. Real understanding comes from ontology, the direct perception of Being.  Therefore, when we enlightened true philosophers determine that we’ve always misunderstood homosexuality (to stick with the same example) because our forebears understood it in isolation from Reality, we say that we now, as the Spirit further unfolds itself in History, finally understand it correctly.

This, and not Science, is what underlies claims of new developments. It must, because there are no relevant new developments under Science as described above.

So, back to the title of this post: while hard scientists are typically pretty clear about what they are doing and what constitutes scientific evidence and conclusions, soft scientists are and must be Hegelian in their approach. (If they want funding, that is – see the Feynman essay linked above.) But the word ‘science’ is used equivocally in the academy to describe both what a chemist does and what a psychiatrist does, even though the chemist would be laughed out of his profession were he to base his claims on ‘insights’ like those of the psychiatrist.

The key point here is that there is no overlap. Repeat: there is no overlap. What soft scientists tend to claim is that they are doing science just like the chemist, except that their subject matter determines their methods – which methods are still science, just different. But that is not the case. Getting back to Hegel, one of his exasperating practices is to almost never give concrete (in the common, not Hegelian, meaning of the term) examples. He can burn through 50 pages of esoteric abstractions without ever once giving you a case in point. (And, amusingly, on those rare occasions when he does give examples he almost always looks foolish – see his account of art history for example.) Similarly, it’s rare to read anything from a sociologist, for example, where the nature of the argument and evidence isn’t shaped pretty much entirely by an Hegelian act of ontological apprehension: they just know How Things Are, and present their case within that context.

These approaches to truth are mutually exclusive. When they both arrive at the same conclusion, it is either an accident or an attempt to square the circle, to make the two systems one by fitting one little corner of one system into another. (An example: brain science and brain scans, where the practitioners use the tools and nomenclature of science – they even wear lab coats! – to support their fundamentally Hegelian phrenology.) This can be most clearly seen in Marxists (and, come to think of it, Freudians), who have determined in advance what sorts of conclusions are allowed to be true, and use simple Bulverism to dismiss any claims to the contrary.

The debate in academia should not be between Science and Creationism, or Science and Religion. If the concern is really for defending truth, it should be between Aristotelian Science and Hegelian Pseudoscience. At least, it should be made clear that the claims of Science on our loyalty are vastly different depending on whether Aristotle or Hegel is the guiding light.

“Error Has No Rights”

Interesting post over at First Things on the concept above: that rights correspond to right – that you have no right to practice wrong.

The contention: that the American idea of religious freedom that treats all religious beliefs as equal before the law versus the European idea of an established religion that might tolerate other beliefs insofar as, in the judgement of the government, those beliefs don’t unduly interfere with the truth lives on in the secular world. If you are in error about the wonderfulness of homosexuality and free love in general, you have no rights – at least, that’s where it’s headed, as the examples in the article indicate.

To sum up: in the old days, under states whose established religion was Catholicism, the Inquisition could determine if you were a heretic or not. If you were, they would hand you over to the state – which, using its prudential judgement, decided if you needed to be burned at the stake.* The logic here was that the state derived its legitimacy in part from its conformity to truth, that the laws of the state were reflections to some extent of the laws of God. In this context,  failure of subjects to acknowledge the the truth about God – committing heresy – undermined the legitimacy of the state. 

We, the Protestant people who founded this country, didn’t much like that. (Not that they disputed the logic – they agreed that the Catholic crowned heads of Europe were illegitimate precisely because their ideas of God – their theologies – were wrong.  The Pilgrims came to America, after all, to avoid religious freedom – they wanted a state where *they* did the burning at the stake, as it were.) But, unfortunately in the eyes of many, by 1789, establishing a national religion was a non-starter – the Constitutional Convention left that up to the states. The states eventually chickened out, too, and so we got the idea that the state, at whatever level,  would not establish any religion. This reluctance to establish religions has become, through a subtle transmogrification, the Separation of Church and State and Freedom of/from Religion.

Which seems to have worked out OK. At least, so far.

The underlying concept, the founding mythology, really, is that the legitimacy of government rests on the consent of the governed. So, if we all played nice and consented to the separation of Church and State, everything was cool.  The Consent of the Governed concept, however, never really got off the ground in practice, and by the Civil War it had been buried for all practical purposes – the South didn’t consent to be governed, but that hardly stopped the North.

So our government’s legitimacy today hangs on something else. The essay linked above suggests that we’re back to claiming that governments depend for their legitimacy on the proper reflection of truth  – but a highly intolerant secular view of truth. Therefore, any deviation from the truth is heresy and treason – it is a threat to the legitimacy of the government.  This is exactly the view taken by the Catholic heads of state in the past, with one key exception: they – the old kings and queens – could view tolerance as virtue, insofar as things could be tolerated without threatening the state. (not saying they always did, but, in general, they were free to let things slide a bit.) It remains to be seen how far the modern established secular religion will feel itself compelled to enforce orthodoxy. The error of not getting on board with homosexual and ‘reproductive’ rights does seem to have no rights.

The track record of previous governments built on secular dogmas does not inspire confidence in the ability of governments so established to tolerate dissent.

*A fate that befell a few thousand people across Europe over the course of a couple centuries. We should be so lucky.

Ends and Odds: Back in the Saddle

– Visited the California redwood forests up near Eureka, CA, with the family. The forests are filled with surprisingly large trees, including this one, conveniently labeled, as the photo attests, ‘Giant Tree’:

Four adult sized people and one little kid can’t reach half way around the trunk; if you put a football field on end (not recommended – pretty sure it would void the warranty) the tree would stretch right past the opposite end zone.

– Micro Music at Mass Review: Attended Sunday Mass at the lovely church pictured below.  St. Joseph’s – a fine name, a fine saint – in Fortuna, CA.

The music was good and bad – we got a couple good hymns, the Latin Sanctus and Agnus Dei (although accompanied by a bizarre synth patch – but, hey, I’ll take it!)  – as well as some St. Louis Jebby songs.

A fantasy occurred to me: say you strip the lyrics from Be Not Afraid and submit the music – the tune and the accompaniment – for a composition class or competition anywhere outside the church music world. Well? Can you imagine somebody at Oberlin or Berkeley or even the local community college going: Yea, that’s what what I’m talking about! Or rather, can’t you see them going: Ya know, you use the same note with what might as well be random syncopation for about 75% of your ‘melody’ – that doesn’t strike you as lame?  And you could branch out into harmonic structures unknown to the Kingsmen without much risk of over doing it.

Anyway, lovely people, beautiful and efficacious Mass, and we got more good music to sing than bad. Not complaining.

– Iron Man III is OK. You may want to sit down for this – the plot has some holes.  But no spoilers here, uh-uh. Well, maybe a little, if you haven’t seen the trailer:

A wise man once said: it’s not the falling that will kill you – it’s the rapid deceleration at the end. Metal suits don’t alter that basic fact of physics one bit – if Iron Man hits the ground or any other even a little solid surface, he’s not jumping up to fight some more – he’s Jello in a can. And since when does genetics and brain imaging hocus-pocus result in human flesh that can withstand 3,000 degree (F, C, whatever)?

But, hey, it’s a superhero movie – it’s not supposed to make sense.

– Boy, politics is getting kinda interesting, in a road-kill/train wreck sort of way.

 

English Reformation

Here is an essay from the UK’s Catholic Herald by an author who wrote two novels set around the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII.

Eight years of research and two books later, I feel a complex tumble of emotions – intrigued, humbled, exhilarated, saddened and outraged – over what I learned about England’s lost monastic life.

Both my regular readers will shocked to hear:

In most books on the reign of Henry VIII the refrain is the same: the numbers of monks, priests and nuns had dwindled by the 16th century, and many questions had already been raised about the abbeys’ financial and moral soundness. After the monasteries were closed and their occupants evicted, no one much cared, except for some rebels in a failed uprising in the north known as the Pilgrimage of Grace.

Two books that went deeper into the topic made me start to question that conventional wisdom: G W Bernard’s The King’s Reformation described the extreme brutality the king doled out to those who opposed him. It went beyond the executions of Sir Thomas More and Cardinal John Fisher – monks and friars who did not want to forsake the pope and swear an oath to Henry VIII as the head of the church were imprisoned, starved, hanged, beheaded and even carved into pieces. Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England made a convincing argument that the Catholic faith was a vibrant and essential part of daily life when Henry VIII broke from Rome because he could not get an annulment from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon. Most significantly, by dissolving the monasteries the king was able to seize a colossal amount of money.

I’ve commented before over how people’s default image of religious cruelty tends to be ‘Spanish Inquisition’, not the English under Henry (or even better, any of the lovely pagan practices – crucifiction, say) :

Abbot Richard Whiting, 81, refused to surrender Glastonbury in 1539. He was arrested, imprisoned in the Tower of London, convicted of treason and dragged on a hurdle to the top of Glastonbury Tor. There, he was hanged, drawn and quartered, his severed head nailed to the gate of the deserted abbey.

(h/t to Amy Welborn)

Random Thoughts from the Road

Travelling on business this week, on the East Coast. But does that mean that my hyperactive mind is taking the week off? Nope:

– Is it possible to walk around historic Richmond, VA, without feeling *some* twinge of sympathy for the South? Slavery is evil, but does the presence of one great evil mean there’s nothing of value in a culture, nothing worth saving and even loving? If we are to judge a culture by a one great evil outweighs all standard, none could survive, least of all our own.

– The Catholic churches in these old cities tend to make me sad or at least a little melancholy. Richmond, for example, has two old churches down town, yet no regular daily morning masses. The Cathedral, adjacent to VCU, can only muster 4 weekday noon masses. Somehow the faith and people who were able to generate the energy to build those churches have dissipated to the point where those buildings are only infrequently used for what they were built for. Not to pick on Richmond in particular, this seems to be the case in just about every old city I visit.

– The mother, father and relatives of a man who dies deserve sympathy and respect, even if that man is a great murderer. Glancing at TVs in airports and hotels, and seeing swarms of reporters jamming microphones and cameras into the faces of the Boston Marathon bombers’ parents and relatives, then speculating over their reactions – vile. These are human beings  first, and there are few pains to compare with a parent loosing a child, even if that child perhaps deserved to die. And what if they are publicity hounds? (Have no reason to suspect this, just speculating here.) That would be a doubly good reason to leave them alone.

– American citizen commits heinous crime on American soil and is apprehended in America by American law enforcement – he gets a trial in an American court, with American rights, and, if convicted by a jury of his American peers, gets set up for life in an American jail.

Period.

I don’t say this because I’m “soft on terror” (whatever the hell that means), but because I’m strong on civil rights. It is enlightened self-interest to want this kid tried in the most fair, careful, legal, and American sense possible.

– The business world is really funny, populated by characters Shakespeare would have had fun with. I never cease to marvel at the comedy inherent in any given room full of business people. In some cases, it’s hard to imagine what, with the exception of perhaps church, would ever motivate that group of people to be together in the same room voluntarily. In others, it’s like a wolf pack, gathered for a common purpose yet fearing each other on some level as well. And then there’s gaggles of people who seem like friends, laughing and chatting at every opportunity – these tend to be people with administrative type functions, but, sometimes, surprisingly, sales teams will be like this instead of like a wolf pack.

In every case, there’s the false solemnity of BVSINESS. Like this whole money thing is the real thing, and the people are there because of the overwhelming reality of money – that the money persists apart from people’s interest in it, somehow, and acts directly as an organizing principle. Then, layer on top this more or less forced geniality. And then look at the Power Structure That Shall Not Be Named – how many bosses are uncomfortable in their skins as bosses, and try to be one of the guys, while retaining the asymmetric power to take away your job, your place in the little synthetic tribe, and – gulp! – your money.  Pals like that one would prefer to do without.

Business is dripping with comedy. Sure, it’s that Irish sort of comedy where the punchline is as often as not someone getting maimed or killed, but funny nonetheless.  Wish we had a Shakespeare to immortalize it.

Child Care

Two of the nicest, smartest people I know run a day care. Our youngest, the only one of our 5 kids to do any daycare, spent a few hours twice a week with them during the school year for a couple years when he was 3 and 4, so that my wife could help out better at school. So, I’m not condemning the idea that moms and dads need some help once in a while, and that it’s great that there are people and places that can provide this help.

Meanwhile, as a working professional, virtually every family I know puts their kids in day care shortly after birth, often for 8 or 10 hours a day. This is considered normal and unavoidable and even a positive good.

This is insane.

We get to pick up the pieces. One the one hand, some kids, mostly boys, are filled with untethered anger. They’re just mad, and can’t say what they’re mad at. They stay mad right on through adolescence. On the other, other kids, mostly girls, have developed coping skills that include all sorts of subtrafuge and dishonesty – they are attempting to integrate a world where mommy and (sometimes) daddy love them, yet where that love includes hiring minimum wage workers to raise them for 10 hours a day, ignoring their pleas to not be left behind. Mommy and (sometimes) daddy say they love them, and even buy them stuff and take them places. Yet the sense of abandonment is deeply ingrained. Since these conflicts cannot be honestly reconciled, the child, in survival mode, ditches honesty.

Daycare is how we prepare our children emotionally for the day they decide to stick us in a nursing home.

These thoughts were triggered by articles in First Thoughts and Forbes. Read ’em and weep.

Final thoughts: I love Europe. Been there several times over the years, and I’m a huge fan of European art, music, architecture and so on. Yet, even in vibrant places like London or even Rome, there’s a sense of decay and doom – Europe today is suffering under deep structural problems – the socialist states have no idea how they will keep paying for all this stuff. European healthcare is bankrupt, essentially, and survives via the expedient of having everybody pretend it isn’t. There are very few European kids, who – being raised in daycare and all – won’t willingly accept the burden of caring for their elders via social programs or otherwise. It seems the dream of communism – that all this government crap will fall away as the worker’s paradise emerges from the wreckage of capitalism – is everybody’s fall back position, whether they acknowledge it or not.

Europe, at least as we know it, is circling the drain.

So, while I have no idea how this works in the long run. it’s pretty clear we should not be looking to Europe for leadership or ideas on how to solve social problems – they have no freaking idea, beyond just using the credit cards to pretend to be rich.

I know a family whose kids were educated for a few years in French schools. Not that this is likely to upset the writers at Slate, but these kids report that, since they were German (Strikes 1 & 2) and Catholic (Yer out!), French parents would instruct their kids to have nothing to do with them. Again, we want to go there?

 

 

What About Act II? From Bedfellows to Cannon Fodder

Can’t put my finger on the movie at the moment, but in this (SciFi?) yarn there is a scene something like this: the up and coming minions deliver the hero to the evil overlord, who says ‘nice work’ and then orders his guards to kill all the surprised-looking henchmen.

Why the surprise, O ye freshly-dead former minions? Were you not paying attention? Did you not notice the tactics your overlord uses? If he’s deceitful, violent, evil and enjoys the exercise of raw power, why would you suppose you would not get machine-gunned when he was through with you?

Similar scenes abound in movies and literature: the loyal servant of the evil master get axed right when he’s thinking he’ll get praised or rewarded. It’s almost like poetic justice or something.

Tacitus tells of  Sejanus, a wiley, ambitious and ruthless schemer who works his way into the confidence of the Emperor Tiberius, becoming the captain of the Praetorian Guard. From this lofty perch, Sejanus used his power to, on the one hand, do Tiberius’s dirty work of offing potential threats to the throne and anyone else who had displeased the Emperor, and, on the other, purging Rome of any rivals to Sejanus himself. Sejanus figured that, if he played his cards right, he would end up emperor himself.

You can guess how that turned out: eventually, Tiberius identified Sejanus as a threat, and he got executed and his body thrown down  the Gemonian stairs, where the crowd tore it to pieces. His family, including two young children, were also executed.  (Aside: Imperial Rome – paganism at its finest.)

And on and on it goes: the climb to favor followed by a fall and death of those who the throne finds useful for a time is a dreary constant of history. One effect of the near-total ignorance of history evident in American political life is the failure of various individuals and interest groups to suspect that they might be next on the chopping block.

But this can’t happen in America, right? We don’t do such things! Right. As our governments become more ‘efficient’ and less constrained by pesky laws and customs, they grow to more and more resemble empires. More than at any time in my 55 year life, trial balloons are being floated to test the public’s reception of the heavy-handed crushing of rights in the name of getting stuff done and keeping people safe: everything from Woody Allen wanting Obama to just be king for a while, to Melissa Harris-Perry arguing that our children are community property to be raised as the state feel fit, to the HHS mandate and the executive right to execute anybody at any time anywhere with no appeal or review. Taken together, doesn’t that describe a People’s Republic or a Caliphate pretty well?

Empires are mafias scaled up – the Don provides peace and order, after his fashion, in exchange for a cut of all action and the tacit agreement of the ruled to look the other way when he needs to off some people. They had it coming anyway, the troublemakers. Outside the Family, the world breaks down into roughly the courtiers and the sheep. Courtiers try to prove their worth and loyalty, mostly by eagerly doing the dirty work, with Sejanus’s hope of maybe becoming Family someday. The sheep try to lay low and hide from the wolves.

But Yazhov never saw it coming until it was too late. Even though the success versus die trying rate for courtiers seems to be very, very low, they never seem to realize that it is only a matter of time. I’ve got to wonder if this ever occurs to gay rights activists – do they really imagine that the powers that be love them, somehow, and will fight for their alleged rights for purely principled reasons? Does it not occur to them that the second they or their demands cease to be useful to the holders of power, they will be cast out without even a shrug or a second thought?  Do they wonder about how, as we slip into Empire at home as well as abroad, and slip back into paganism, the rights they seek will be protected by nothing more than the whim of the Emperor? Emperors are pretty fickle, and tolerate uppity people only exactly as far and as long as they are useful. Then the line that runs through Sejanus and Robespierre and Yazhov and million others will run through them as well.

Then, the irony kicks in: the same Church that is now saying: “We love you, fellow children of God, but we cannot in truth give our assent to what you want, because to do so would be to deny your humanity”  will revert to saying what it has said for centuries: “We love you, fellow children of God, and will defend your rights against those who would deny your humanity. “