Potpourri

Yes, sports fans! It's tabclearingday, when the gallimaufrey of tabs accumulating on the TOFian browser gets blown off with short shrift.

1. Quotes of the Day

a) Our [religion] is assuredly the most ridiculous, the most absurd and the most bloody religion which has ever infected this world. Your Majesty will do the human race an eternal service by extirpating this infamous superstition, I do not say among the rabble, who are not worthy of being enlightened and who are apt for every yoke; I say among honest people, among men who think, among those who wish to think.
-- Voltaire, Letter to Friedrich II, k.von Preussen
b) The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers’ pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity.
-- Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall, ch.38.

And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal with . . . those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, and not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go. . . . And the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favor the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity — beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds. . . . And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness . . . is death. . . . The men of the New Republic . . . will have an ideal that will make the killing worth the while.
-- H.G. Wells  The New Republic

 Voltaire pointed out that enlightenment was only for the enlightened, like himself; not for the basket of deplorables unworthy rabble. More than a tough of Hegel, there.

Gibbon was evidently a proto-Nietzsche, based on what he praised and what he disparaged. Patience, chastity, charity... Boo. Military spirit, Yay!

Neither of them yet had the vocabulary to evoke the Superman or the Woke. but the thought-cliche of the special aristocracy -- the Enlightened, the Illuminati, the Brights, the Vanguard -- runs through it. As for the rest of us, remember that phrase "apt for every yoke" and bend over to welcome your new masters.  In the end, though, the Morlocks eat the Eloi. (Remember, Wells thought that a bad thing; but I hear they taste like chicken.)

2. Food for Thought
Speaking of chicken. At the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America, the Middle Ages were roundly defended from the Dead White Males like Voltaire and Gibbon, who had relegated them to the 'midddle' between the enlightened ancients and the enlightened 18th cent. (i.e., themselves). However, that defense was mounted without a single reference to Christianity, let alone to Catholicism; so it appears the likes of Voltaire and Gibbon have been victorious after all.




But the vanishing of theology from the schools has not led to 'no theology,' but to 'bad theology,' and as Chesterton noted, the man who believes in nothing will eventually believe in anything. Or as Midgley said, those who claim no metaphysics are usually enslaved to some outdated form of it. It is no surprise then that the absence of virtues so derogated by Gibbon -- charity, above all -- has ended with road rage, school shootings, and campus riots against heretical speakers. The surprise rather is that no one has remarked that these things are connected.

3. And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side

An essay on the destructiveness and irrationality of the latest fascination to sweep the intelligentsia, reminding one of the Tiptree story,

4. Intension and Extension

What a term contains differs from what it covers. Siris considers the matter here, using the term "teacher" to show the difference. It might be that much of the current rancor in the public square stems from a failure to appreciate the distinction.

5. Blind Spot

A couple of physicists and a philosopher walk into a bar.... and notice that science has a great big blind spot. There are things that it just cannot see. Just as a person who relies exclusively on a metal detector will never find wood.

6. Speaking of Physics

Sabine Hossenfelder wonders at the reasons there has been nothing really new in basic physics since the great paradigm shift of the turn of the last century. It's all i-dotting and t-crossing. So far, the Standard Model stands strong!

7. What to Do with Surprise Medical Bills.

The Manhattan Contrarian says: Don't pay 'em.

8. Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are.

Several of the swarm of Democrats vying to challenge the Donald have promised to implement Health Care For All, for example by extending Medicare to everyone.  TOF thought this had been settled by the Affordable Care Act, but no one seems to want to mention it any more. ACA is in hiding. This Act, in the spirit of all slapdash government 'programs' has made health insurance less affordable, hurting the poor most of all, as usual, The Manhattan Contrarian notes that these new proposals will work for sure, no foolin'.

Quote of the Day

"The mailings of pipe bombs, and similar activities, have been described as hate crimes. Is that what makes them bad — the hatred? Or is it the way the hatred is expressed?
Might it be okay, for instance, to mail pipe bombs randomly, to people you do not hate, indeed, don’t even know?"
-- David Warren

Quote of the Day

“Indeed men too often take upon themselves in the prosecution of their revenge to set the example of doing away with those general laws to which all alike can look for salvation in adversity, instead of allowing them to subsist against the day of danger when their aid may be required.”
-- Thucydides, History of the Pelopponesian War, Book III



http://www.wright.edu/~christopher.oldstone-moore/Thucydides.htm
The consequences of refusing to accept the outcome of an election -- in 431 BC.

Quote of the Day

“Social” justice is the opposite of justice as intelligibly conceived. It is justice not to persons, but to abstract groups. It is invariably a programme of State intervention, and it will invariably bring real and often acute injustice to most of the individuals it touches. There is no coincidence that those who cry for “social justice” not only engage in brownshirt demonstrations, but call their opponents “Nazis.”
-- David Warren

Quote of the Day

"Conservative presidents were 0-3 in appointing O'Connor, Souter and Kennedy, and if even one of the appointments turned out otherwise much of the last 30 years of the Sexual Revolution would not have happened (cf. Casey, Lawrence v. Texas, Stenberg v. Carhart, Obergefell).  Anthony Kennedy alone is arguably as important to the advance of the Sexual Revolution as Hugh Hefner, and to reflect on him being Regan's alternative to Robert Bork is to recognize how contingent, fragile and unpredictable the great movements of history are."
-- James Chastek

Quote of the Day

From Elizabeth Anscombe's article, "Why Have Children?":

This very title tells of the times we live in. I would like you to imagine a title for a lecture eighty years hence: "Why digest food?" I leave it to the reader to imagine -- or think of -- the technology already with us; and the 'scientific advance' and its practicalities, including the resultant apparatus ending in tubes with needles and switches in every house. Also the successful propaganda denigrating the "merely biological" conception of eating and the hostility -- known to have prevailed in the Catholic church for many centuries -- towards its pleasure and thereby towards its spiritual meaningfulness and civilized quality. As whole peoples in our time have regarded feeding their babies at the breast as something rather for savages, so might people of the future regard nourishment by digesting the lovely food we eat in the same way.

Don't think it inconceivable. The human race is a fallen race. It has fits of madness, sometimes merely local, sometimes nearly global....

G. E. M. Anscombe, "Why Have Children?", Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Volume 63 (1989), pg. 48.

Quote of the Day

"We have developed an allergy to poetry; like the allergy to peanuts, but often worse. Take allegory, for instance. In the modern mind, it can induce a stroke. Most of the Bible, to say nothing of other significant literary works, has become unreadable or incomprehensible to us, because we cannot take “play” seriously"
-- David Warren

Quote of the Day

"History never repeats itself. Only the laugh track is on a perpetual loop." -- David Warren

Quote of the Day

"Blood and kinship relations found racial distinctions, and there has been a campaign since the wars to minimize their significance. One sign that problems have arisen in this attempt has been the transition from integration to diversity, i.e. where as before we wanted all races to share a common life we now want them to live different lives, but put them on display for an alleged pedagogic value. “Separate but equal” returns as celebrated."
-- James Chastek

Quote of the Day

"It is an elite rage of law professors and management consultants. It’s the rage of the powerful, which is always more dangerous than the rage of the downtrodden."
-- R.R.Reno

The 32 Lost Years of Antibiotics

We live in a culture of “research” and “planning.” I’m not against honest research (which is rare), but mortally opposed to “planning.” The best it can ever achieve is defeat, when its ham-fist efforts fail to prevent some beauty, truth, or good from emerging. Countless billions, yanked from the taxpayers’ pockets, and collected through highly professional, tear-jerking campaigns, are spent “trying to find a cure” for this or that. When and if it comes, it is invariably the product of some nerd somewhere, with a messy lab.
-- David Warren, "That's funny."

The 32 Lost Years of Antibiotics

Progress in Gerontology

"The history of science suggests the reflection that it is very difficult for the same person at the same time to do justice to two conflicting theories. Take for example the Cartesian hypothesis of vortices and the Newtonian doctrine of universal gravitation. The adherents of the earlier opinion resisted the evidence of the Newtonian theory with a degree of obstinacy and captiousness which now appears to us quite marvellous: while on the other hand, since the complete triumph of the Newtonians, they have been unwilling to allow any merit at all to the doctrine of the vortices. It cannot but seem strange, to a calm observer of such changes, that in a matter which depends upon mathematical proofs, the whole body of the mathematical world should pass over, as in this and similar cases they seem to have done, from an opinion confidently held, to its opposite. No doubt this must be, in part, ascribed to the lasting effects of eduction and early prejudice. The old opinion passes away with the old generation: the new theory grows to its full vigour when its congenital disciples grow to be masters. John Bernoulli continues a Cartesian to the last; Daniel, his son, is a Newtonian from the first."

-- William Whewell, "Of the Transformation of Hypotheses in the History of Science," presented before the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 19 May 1851.
[h/t: Siris]

Quotes of the Day

Today's quote got TOF thinking -- always a scary thing -- and led him to hunt up a couple of other quotes that seemed in the same vein. First, the quote that started the thought process.

"The heroes of declining nations are always the same—the athlete, the singer or the actor. The word ‘celebrity’ today is used to designate a comedian or a football player, not a statesman, a general, or a literary genius." 

-- Glubb pasha, (1897-1986) 

"The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival" (1979)

Interestingly, he based this on his studies of the old Abbasid Caliphate, the Mamluq Empire, the 'Osmanli Turkish Empire, and others, compared cross-culturally. 

Sir John's historical analysis may be far too glib. Glubb glib? Say it ain't so! TOF can roll his eyes at some modernist categories used out of context. "Universities" in the 7th century? Forsooth! But recall that a "celebrity" once meant not someone who is merely famous, not to say notorious, but someone in whose honor a formal celebration had been held: a banquet served, scholarly papers read, speeches given. Galileo was given such a fest by the Jesuits shortly after his first book came out and was thereafter referred to as "a celebrated astronomer."

Now some literary geniuses are indeed celebrated in the modern sense of being famed, although genius ought be equated neither with best seller lists nor with the compatibility of their works with one's own prior socio-political commitments. There are surely some generals who can be celebrated -- for their competency in the arts of war, if nothing else. But statesmen? Are there really such things anymore? A slight digression in the sequence of quotes:

"Meanwhile, at the end of the twentieth century a degeneration in the conduct of the relations of states goes on. When I see or hear or read the language or the behavior of foreign ministers and ambassadors, I am a witness of an enormous decline, not only of intelligence but of diplomatic practice (including decorum) and human common sense. I write 'enormous' since the symptoms of a babbling barbarism are all around us... What may succeed it is the rule of tougher barbarians who will not, because they need not, babble." 

-- John Lukacs, At the End of an Age

And yes, he wrote that before Twitter was invented. But now let us couple Glubb's observation with two others. Among other signs of the autumn of the Modern world, John Lukacs cited the shift from books to images (movies, TV shows). "Show, don't tell." The celebrities cited by Glubb pasha seem right in line with this. And earlier, Jacques Barzun remarked:

The new pastimes of the educated amateur are the arts of nonarticulate expression: music and painting…  Everywhere picture and sound crowd out text.  The Word is in disfavor…

 – Jacques Barzun, The House of Intellect 

Barzun also noted the replacement by the 1950s of "I think that..." with "I feel that..." in colloquial speech.

More recently we have this comment from the then-archbishop of Denver which puts some consequences of the shift:

Visual and electronic media, today’s dominant media, need a certain kind of content. They thrive on brevity, speed, change, urgency, variety and feelings. But thinking requires the opposite. Thinking takes time. It needs silence and the methodical skills of logic. ... [This trend is] a very dangerous thing in a democracy, which is a form of government that demands intellectual and moral maturity from its citizens to survive.

--Charles Joseph Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., “Catholics and the ‘Fourth Estate’”

But as long as we are attuned to the Spirit of the Age and keep au courant with this morning's fads, all shall be well.

Thought for the Day

from David Warren:

I had always assumed that mock chicken was an industrial by-product, containing traces of poultry for flavouring, in a crumbly rind probably coloured with orange textile dye. I supposed that live chickens had been harmed somewhere in the manufacturing process, which had included the mocking operation. I guessed the managers at the industrial abattoir hired underemployed professional comedians to mock the chickens, prior to slaughter — doing satirical imitations of the way they walk, try to fly, express enmity towards those who steal their eggs — while taunting them with demeaning imprecations such as, “You’re not a real chicken,” &c — ideally in dactylic hexameters.
It turns out I was wrong. Unless the ingredient list on the package is fake news (I have just retrieved it), our contemporary mock chicken contains miscellaneous “and/or” meats, possibly but not necessarily including winged animals; plus potassium lactate and soy protein; sodium phosphates, erythorbates, diacetates, and nitrates; glucose solids; maltodextrin; “spices”; and of course my favourite, monosodium glutamate. 

-- Mock Chicken

Thought for the Day

One learns something of a society through its statutes, and by old scholars like Rashdall, and Haskins, I [David Warren] was introduced to the punctilios in mediaeval university towns.

Much attention is given to student behaviour, and from Leipzig, for example, I recall the carefully stepped fines that begin for threatening your professor with a missile. The fine increases if you throw and miss; doubles if you hit him; and further costs may be assessed, depending on the nature of his injuries. For this and for other infractions, it is useful to have things spelt out, so the student on a tight budget may know what he can afford.

-- David Warren, "Some Attitudinizing"

Today, of course, it is all or nothing. 

Quote of the Day

The Creator hath endowed us with poetical minds, and we have been trying to rewire them as adding machines.
-- David Warren, "Sweetness and Light"

Does This Sound a Tad Ominous?

“Be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet.”
-- Marine Gen. James "Mad Dog" Mattis,
in a speech to his Marines when they arrived in Iraq in 2003

Trump to meet with Mattis on Saturday
-- headline, Politico, 11/18/16

Quote of the Day

"He [Kraus] had seen the First World War coming, in the malice spreading through the language; in the smugness that fogged perception; in the lies that people told each other, to preserve their amour-propre; in the jingo that lurked beneath the genteel. After, he saw worse.

.....

"My sense is that we are once again coming to the end of lies and hypocrisy. The political class has delivered us once more, by increments. Trump and Sanders say things that are plain; in Europe, too, we have candidates who mean what they say. What they say is blather, and frequently unhinged, and not lying but indifferent to fact. It is sincere, however."

-- David Warren, "The decline of requirements"

 

One often hears it said of this personality or that that "at least he says what he means!" He is no hypocrite. Late Moderns having elevated hypocrisy to the One and Only Sin, a man who is no hypocrite begins to seem like the immaculate conception. But in addition to meaning what he says, it is well to ask what he says means. Genghis Khan was a straightforward, no-nonsense kind of guy, too.

He brought hope and change, as well; at least for some. But the same question can be asked of change. What is to be changed and in what direction? Most times, it is for the worse. (Recall: Most mutations kill the organism.) It turns out that young European idealists in the 20s and 30s were also hopey-changey, but what they changed was from boring bourgeois Biedermeier to exciting proletarian fascism. 

 

And choice. Who can be against choice? Well, except when evacuating an burning airplane. You really don't want every passenger "thinking for himself," because he is liable to think I gotta get out of here! and pay little attention to the people in his way. But other than that. Oh, and whether evolution is true. Otherwise, "I Choose!" is an unanswerable assertion by the Triumphant Will. 

 

But as Michael Novak once wrote: 

Professors in countless classrooms in many different disciplines report that students have already been well taught that, when they are faced with any moral proposition, the proper response is, “That’s just your opinion.” They are resistant, then, to resolving disagreements by reasoned arguments. They aver, “You choose your good, and I’ll choose mine.” Reasoned debate is replaced by naked will. I choose. Don’t ask me to give reasons—I just choose.

This circumstance seems to be what Nietzsche meant when he observed that no man of reason should rejoice in the death of God. Experience will soon show, he was certain, that with the death of God arrives the death of reason. And what is the path out of nihilism?

The Modern Ages began their long collapse just over a century ago, and the light has very nearly burned out. Well, they were fun while they lasted.

Quote of the Day

[h/t] Siris
"That trolling is a shameful thing, and that no one of sense would accept to be called ‘troll’, all are agreed; but what trolling is, and how many its species are, and whether there is an excellence of the troll, is unclear. And indeed trolling is said in many ways; for some call ‘troll’ anyone who is abusive on the internet, but this is only the disagreeable person, or in newspaper comments the angry old man. And the one who disagrees loudly on the blog on each occasion is a lover of controversy, or an attention-seeker. And none of these is the troll, or perhaps some are of a mixed type; for there is no art in what they do...."

[Aristotle], On Trolling

****

journals.cambridge.org

St. Anselm's Dying Words

Today is the feast of St. Anselm of Canterbury. His associate and biographer Eadmer relates his deathbed scene. It was Palm Sunday, and one of those clustered around Anselm's bed remarked that it looked as if the archbishop would be celebrating Easter with God, Anselm replied,

"Well, if that's what God wants I'll gladly obey him, but if he prefers to let me stay here long enough to solve the problem of the origin of the soul (which I've been thinking about a great deal lately) I would gratefully accept that opportunity, because I doubt if anyone else is going to solve it once I'm gone."

There is something marvelously scholastic about that remark, almost as good as the deathbed of St. Macrina the Younger, who spent her dying hours debating Platonic philosophy with her brother.