Spogbolt

No posting for the time being

2007-08-06T16:20:00.000-02:30

Posting on this blog is in abeyance because I am ill.

Plato: A.E. Taylor vs. P.E. More

2007-07-26T21:01:00.001-02:30

To the newcomer to the study of Plato it is remarkable how much disagreement there is, among even the most respected authorities, as to what Platonism actually is. For example, A.E. Taylor cited Paul Elmore More (see July 13 post) as one of the indispensable authors on Platonism, yet Taylor's interpretation is in at least one crucial way almost the opposite of More's.

An essential feature of More's Platonism, as found in his book of that same name, was that it was dualistic, holding that God formed the world out of a non-divine matter ruled by "necessity" (and thereby resembling matter as now understood by physics). This dualism represented a definite advance, More believes, over the monistic pantheism of the pre-Socratic Parmenides and his defender Zeno. It is a kind of middle way between pure materialism and pure idealism. Such dualism provides a solution to the problem of evil: evil is the fault of the resistance of matter to being formed into a perfect cosmos. This seems like an attractive solution in that it avoids the need, fraught with spiritual danger, to postulate the existence of a malevolent second god, as in Manichaeanism or other kinds of Gnosticism (or for that matter the Christian idea of the Devil). No such malign higher power is necessary to account for evil; one must only grasp the tendency of matter to relapse into chaos if left to its own devices, or in the terms of modern science, entropy. In the words of More, the world is a good, ordered place insofar as is allowed by "natural necessity consenting and yielding to the persuasion of reason."

For More, Platonic dualism also covers ethics, which he regards as the central concern of Platonism and the key to understanding it as an integrated whole. (For example, the Republic is on one level a utopian blueprint, but more essentially, More holds, it is an examination of the otherwise hidden inner natures of various kinds of individual souls by drawing analogies with the more visible and familiar structures of various kinds of city-states.) Each of the three pairs of ethical concepts,

pleasure	happiness
virtue	morality
opinion	knowledge

indicates two fundamentally different entities—though this does not mean that the two (for example, pleasure and happiness) can never be found together. The first member of each pair is the natural counterpart of the second, 'divine' member. And each of these three natural attributes is associated with the mortal, pleasure-driven component of a dualistic Platonic soul, while each divine attribute is linked to the higher, immortal part of that soul.

By contrast, A.E. Taylor (in Platonism and its Influence) in effect regards dualism, at least as far as the doctrine of Creation is concerned, as merely an Aristotelian deviation from Plato. "Plato . . . teaches 'creation' in the sense that he regards the existence of the whole universe and everything in it as an effect of one single cause, the divine goodness, exactly as Thomas [Aquinas] himself does." Aristotle on the other hand "makes the universe a resultant of two equally eternal causes, God, the source of the motion by which 'Form' or 'structure' is evoked or induced, and the structureless 'first matter,' . . . from which or upon which the First Mover evokes or superinduces 'Form.' (pp 123–124). Each author praises Plato for holding the view which that author favours, but the two views do not seem compatible.

(To further add to the confusion, More regards the neo-Platonists as having regressed from dualism to monism, while Taylor seems to overlook any basic distinction between Plato and the neo-Platonists on this point.)

Half of kids in Ontario Crown care are drugged

2007-07-16T20:21:00.001-02:30

Here are some edited extracts from a Globe and Mail article (June 9, subscription only) on the officially sponsored doping of children in Canada, with particular reference to those who find themselves wards of the Crown in Ontario. (H/T: Epoch Times. Full article, by Margaret Philp, obtained from Psychdata.) One one hand, the problem seems rapidly to be getting worse; on the other, at least some people in authority acknowledge its existence . . . . CONTINUE

The central position of Plato

2007-07-13T00:13:00.001-02:30

The now little-known Paul Elmer More (see for example this article by Brian Domitrovic) was one of the leading American conservative thinkers of the early part of the twentieth century. His major work was a series of volumes on "the Greek tradition from the death of Socrates to the Council of Chalcedon", an attempt to provide a philosophical history of Western culture, through both its Hellenic and Christian phases, that has some parallels to Voegelin's (much larger) project. More's work seems more accessible, however, than that of Voegelin, whose manner is often less that of a systematic teacher than of someone discussing ideas with which the reader is assumed already to be familiar. Reading More might be a good way of learning about Platonist philosophy.

Here is More issuing a kind of "Platonist manifesto": . . . . CONTINUE

New piece by Theodore Dalrymple

2007-07-11T20:14:00.000-02:30

Here—from a comparatively obscure source, the Nova-Scotia-based Atlantic Institute for Market Studies—is a new article by Theodore Dalrymple, based on a speech he recently gave to the Civitas conference in Halifax: The Paradoxes of Cultural Confidence: Is Western Culture in Decline? (pdf format).

Pagan transcendentalism

2007-07-10T01:31:00.001-02:30

(Revised post)

. . . . [E]ven if Plato is not describing true creation ex nihilo, it seems clear that the 'raw material' on which Plato's Creator worked is so formless that it must make little difference to his transcendent status. If the Creator is 'in' the world, it is only the world in an utterly chaotic and dead form, not the world with which we are familiar. In the Timaeus, even the immortality of the gods, let alone the immortality of the souls of mortals, remains dependent on the goodness of the Creator; it is not an inherent property of souls . . . . Plato [also] distinguishes the divine part of man, created directly by the Creator, from man's mortal components, the creation of which is delegated to the lesser gods. Should this belief not strongly encourage respect for the essential core of the individual, irrespective of "physical or social facts"? Does this not call into question Voegelin's claims about the key advance in consciousness represented by Christianity? CONTINUE

D.H. Lawrence on Christianity

2007-07-07T02:33:00.000-02:30

Lawrence's Apocalypse, written when he was dying, contains his insights into the Book of Revelation. Basically he sees this as the highly influential foundation of a kind of shadow-side to the religion of love, Christianity—though he also finds in it some positive aspects, including interesting residues from lost pagan materials which he believes were used in the construction of the later Jewish and Christian apocalyptic writings. In condemning the Book of Revelation, Lawrence issues a radical denunciation of Christianity as a whole, comparable to Nietzsche's. It is difficult for me to tell whether his claim is a powerful but dangerous truth or a powerful and dangerous lie, but in either case it seems an important one.

It is possible to regard Lawrence as refuting Eric Voegelin's argument about the advance in human consciousness represented by Christianity . . . . CONTINUE

Eric Voegelin (15)

2007-07-01T00:47:00.000-02:30

Glenn Hughes on "Eric Voegelin and Christianity"

Voegelin has important things to say about Christianity but they may tend to remain buried among his copious writings. A valuable 2004 Intercollegiate Review article by Glenn Hughes, available here as a pdf file, summarizes Voegelin's assessment of the place of Christianity in the development of human consciousness . . . . CONTINUE

Fjordman on the impact of Christianity

2007-06-27T23:46:00.000-02:30

Here (from June 19) is an interesting discussion at Gates of Vienna of the "slave morality" element in Christianity and post-Christian Western culture. Essayist Fjordman identifies both the love of feeling persecuted and feelings of cultural guilt, which are now threatening to cripple Western societies, as being rooted in Christian or Judeo-Christian ethics; he notes that our guilt feelings may now be worse than when Christianity was thriving, however, because we no longer have Christ to wash away the sins for which we feel guilty.

The critical comment by "Mike" (Michael W. Perry) following the essay is particularly significant . . . . CONTINUE

Paganism: "Spengler" out to lunch

2007-06-25T00:28:00.001-02:30

Spengler-of-the-Asia-Times has been arguing, following Franz Rosenzweig, that "pagan society everywhere always is 'totalitarian' in character, and that Islam is a form of paganism masquerading as revealed religion." While Spengler as always provides much food for thought, his characterization of paganism, in particular of Greek paganism, is a travesty. I will focus here on what he says about individuality under paganism, ignoring his other dubious claim that paganism is a "culture of death" (which would probably have surprised the life-affirming pagan Greeks, for example—or, farther afield, the Taoist Chinese) . . . . CONTINUE

Israel as a crypto-Christian society

2007-06-23T23:00:00.000-02:30

I have been ill lately, which is why posting has been even more irregular than usual . . . . with any luck, normal irregularity will now resume.

Paul Eidelberg asks (June 18) why Israelis have tolerated the recent succession of increasingly bad governments. He proposes that in part it is because they are mostly "Jewish humanists", by which I think that he means heirs to the modern Western Christian-based tradition who happen to be Jewish. The combination of "humanism" with Jewish moral seriousness (Eidelberg may also be implying) has unfortunate results.

Jewish humanists are really Christians without the Christian [God]. They practice with a vengeance what Christians preach: "love your enemies," "turn the other cheek," "do not resist evil." One may even say that contemporary Israel is the only Christian nation on earth! When it comes to loving one's enemies, turning the other cheek, and not resisting evil, present-day Israel has no equal in the annals of human history.

Ayatollah Khomeini on patriotism

2007-06-12T20:21:00.000-02:30

"We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah; for patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land [Iran] burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world."

—Ayatollah Khomeini, Qom, 1980 (according to blogger Aryamehr and many other sources; h/t American Thinker).

Robert Ingersoll on non-retaliation

2007-06-07T23:25:00.001-02:30

A few days ago I came across the interesting-looking site infidels.org, which has online the complete works of the 19th-century American agnostic, Robert Ingersoll. Ingersoll undertakes a morally serious (though perhaps not sufficiently profound) effort to discredit Christianity as unique revelation, or indeed, as far as large parts of both Old and New Testaments are concerned, as any revelation at all. As part of this project, in part I of "The Ingersoll–Black debate", Ingersoll presents an illuminating collection of positions taken on the question of nonretaliation for evil by different religions and philosophers. Here is a summary: . . . . CONTINUE

Caroline Glick on the call for a UK boycott of Israel

2007-06-02T19:40:00.000-02:30

(Update 06/04: Melanie Phillips points out that the University and College Union is far from the only British association pushing for a boycott of Israel. In recent weeks, journalists, doctors and architects have also launched such attempts, and the public sector union Unison is poised to begin its own boycott of Israeli goods and services.)

Here is Caroline Glick:

Wednesday's decision by Britain's University and College Union to call for a boycott of Israeli universities and colleges was not only hypocritical. It was suicidal.
. . . . By calling for a boycott of Israeli universities, Britain's academic establishment is turning its back not only on Israel, but on Britain. When Britain's professoriate rejects Israel's right to exist as a Jewish, democratic nation-state and glorifies Palestinian society which supports global jihad and the destruction of Western civilization, it is rejecting the British state.
They are embracing a culture founded on a rejection of the culture and traditions that have formed Britain since the Magna Carta was issued in 1215. For the past 800 years, Britain has stood for individual liberty and freedom of inquiry - at least for the British themselves. In universities like Oxford and Cambridge, it was this humanist spirit and the justified national and cultural pride it nurtured which facilitated Britain's rise to international power. By boycotting Israel, which itself embodies these British ideals, the British are abrogating their own traditions of openness. Consequently, they are destroying themselves.

—From Real Clear Politics.

The Hellenic moment in ancient Christianity (2)

2007-06-02T01:50:00.000-02:30

Together, the primitive and monastic phases of Christianity can be defined to cover virtually the whole lifespan of the Western Roman Empire; the first monastic community of St. Pachomius in 320, for example, was founded within a few years of the legalization of Christianity. Wedged between these two periods, however, and to some extent overlapping with them, was a "Hellenic" (or Hellenic conversion) phase, dated by Peter Brown at 300–363 A.D. During this period, Christianity seemed to become reconciled with the pre-existing Greco-Roman civilization, and absorbed aspects of that civilization. The resulting changes that Christianity went through continued to have an effect on the religion later on as well. To a great extent, though, Christianity (especially in the West) soon renounced those Hellenic influences, so that "Hellenic Christianity" has quite a different flavour from the familiar traditional kind—for example, in its willingness to appeal to unaided human reason . . . . CONTINUE

The Hellenic moment in ancient Christianity (1)

2007-05-30T03:39:00.001-02:30

In a recent comment I cited a book which describes how Western Christianity absorbed a great deal of Germanic pagan culture following the collapse of the Roman Empire, and how what we now think of as traditional Christianity took on a Germanic martial tinge as a result. In that post I referred to the Christianity of the Empire as "primitive" Christianity, as distinguished from the later Germanized kind. Actually, this is much too simplistic, as is shown in Peter Brown's well-known and valuable (also, readable and not very long) work, The World of Late Antiquity (1971).

While Brown does not set out an explicit scheme, he seems to divide the history of Christianity in the Roman Empire into three phases, only the first of which can rightfully be called "primitive". This was Christianity in its first two centuries, until about 300 A.D. . . . . CONTINUE

Boys forced to wear dresses in Sweden

2007-05-26T21:04:00.000-02:30

Well-known Norwegian blogger Fjordman reports that according to Swedish journalist Kurt Lundgren, some Swedish preschools are requiring boys to wear dresses during certain weeks, as part of a Swedish Teachers' Union initiative to promote equal regard for homosexuality, transsexuality, etc., among three- to six-year-olds. Lundgren considers this to be child abuse. You think it won't happen in North America? Just wait a few years. In the meantime, one might spare a few thoughts for the continuing state-sanctioned doping of several million North American children—mainly boys—with "kiddie cocaine" (Ritalin).

A popular check on the Commons (3)

2007-05-17T23:44:00.001-02:30

(b) The direct-democratic check

A principle driving the encroachment on representative institutions by political parties seems to be that representative democracy breaks down when the voters want to make decisions directly, as they nowadays do in the case of the choice of one or other party to form the government . . . .

As suggested in the previous post, it is plausible that severing the electoral accountability of representatives, by limiting them to single terms of office, would produce a degree of independence from both parties and constituents on the part of the representatives . . . .

The other possible approach is not to elect representatives at all, but to embrace (in this branch of government) some form of direct democracy, resembling that of the ancient city-states. The popular will is ascertained either by a referendum in which the whole electorate can participate, or by establishing a randomly selected political jury as a representative body . . . . CONTINUE

A popular check on the Commons (2)

2007-05-15T02:51:00.000-02:30

The nature of the popular assembly

How might one establish an assembly whose members represented public opinion, as distinguished from the interests of political parties? The basic problem here is that the usual kind of election will almost certainly elicit candidates who run on a party label. If the assembly has the power to remove the government, those who support the government at the time of the assembly election will vote for candidates pledged to keep the government in power, while opponents of the government will vote for candidates pledged to remove the government whenever possible. If the winning candidates keep these pledges (which is guaranteed by party organizations), the assembly will be made up of members committed to support or oppose the government regardless of what it does. It will essentially be a redundant copy of the Commons . . . . CONTINUE

Steven Hayward on global warming

2007-05-10T23:48:00.000-02:30

Here from the Heritage Foundation (April 18) is a useful resource if your friends all think that Al Gore is "Seal of the Prophets" of Global Warming: the soundtrack of an engaging film by Steven Hayward, "An Inconvenient Truth . . . or Convenient Fiction", followed by questions from a live audience and responses by Dr. Hayward. (Direct link to MP3 (27 MB) here. Video version also available.) Hayward rapidly summarizes many of the scientific uncertainties while remaining fairly comprehensible. He seems more moderate on the issue than many in his conservative-thinktank audience, seeing some room for compromise with environmentalists in the form of a revenue-neutral carbon tax, which would not, he thinks, much hurt the economy even if it proved to be unnecessary from an environmental point of view, and which would also be a good way of reducing American dependence on foreign oil. A point he made that struck me was that Gore has apparently deliberately omitted mention of the nuclear approach to cutting greenhouse gases, yet at the same time trumpets global warming as a catastrophe. If Gore really meant this, Hayward delicately hints, he would not be so picky about the ways to head off that catastrophe. So it seems reasonable to conclude that Gore is trying to scare people with hyperbole he does not himself believe.

A popular check on the Commons (1)

2007-05-06T02:56:00.000-02:30

(A tentative argument)

IN a recent post I claimed, referring to the Westminster constitutional model as a starting-point, that in order to restore popular representation it would be necessary to establish a popular assembly with the power, not only to block unpopular legislation, but to dismiss unpopular governments at relatively short notice; and that such an assembly would have to be constituted so as to remain more or less free of party control. This is not to argue against the existence of the familiar, party-dominated House of Commons, which seems as well suited to the role of government as might reasonably be expected (though I think it would be better suited if it had the power to choose the party leaders, as was traditionally the case). The point is, rather, that the Commons, made up of party loyalists rather than representatives of the popular interest, is now unfit to play its ancient role of a check on government . . . . CONTINUE

Christianity, paganism, liberalism

2007-05-03T02:47:00.000-02:30

Here is a comment I just posted at Conservative Swede, who has been doing a great deal of thinking about the connection between Christian ethics and the contemporary pathological form of liberalism.

I don't agree that the problem with Christianity/liberalism is that it is an ethical system shorn of its religious component. Primitive Christianity—the Christianity of the Roman Empire—certainly had a religious centre, but it was also other-worldly, concerned with individual salvation rather than the welfare of the political community, and anti-militarist. This point is made in a book published in 1994, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity by James C. Russell, which is very pertinent to the subject you are discussing (and also contains pointers to a lot of relevant scholarship on the subject). Modern liberalism may in essence represent a return to primitive Christianity on the ethical level . . . . CONTINUE

A healthy response to government regulation

2007-04-29T19:57:00.000-02:30

Elling Lien, in the St. John's community newspaper The Scope, responds to City Council's new, state-of-the-art by-law requiring that all our household garbage be covered by nets or put in metal or plastic containers:

Just to avoid the trouble of covering it, I've taken to shredding all of my garbage in a wood chipper and flushing it down the toilet. That way the gulls can truly enjoy it.

(St. John's sewage is discharged picturesquely in the middle of the harbour, where the seagulls do indeed enjoy a perpetual banquet.) I can't wait to hear what he plans on doing about the incandescent lightbulb ban . . .

Peter Hitchens in Iran

2007-04-26T21:33:00.000-02:30

Peter Hitchens recently took a ten-day trip to Iran, and has written down his observations in three articles which are worth reading:

Persian Diary Part 1 (April 23)
Persian Diary Part 2 (April 25)
Mail on Sunday article on Iran (April 21)

Hitchens is sympathetic to most of the Iranians, as distinguished from their régime, seeing them as "our natural ally in the Middle East" (possibly forgetting about the existence of Israel here). He believes the régime may fall provided that Iran is not attacked from outside. He may, however, be so anxious to avoid war with Iran that he evades the question of what to do in the event that Iran does succeed in acquiring nuclear weapons.

Burke on the democratic element

2007-04-18T03:30:00.000-02:30

Edmund Burke strongly upheld the mixed constitution of 18th century Britain, with its monarchical, aristocratic and democratic (or at least popular) elements. To those who insist on unfettered or "Volkskammer" democracy as their ideal, Burke, who by the standards of his time was fairly liberal, is now likely to seem a reactionary. Modern democrats might be surprised, however, if they looked at what Burke says about the popular element of the mixed constitution in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents. His basic position is that while the popular element should not overwhelm the other two, the popular representative assembly itself should nevertheless be genuinely popular—not vitiated by aristocratic or monarchical tendencies . . . . CONTINUE

Spengler on a new war over Kosovo

2007-04-17T02:36:00.000-02:30

Asia Times columnist Spengler has just posted an important article in which he describes tensions between Russia and the West over Kosovo—and the possibly far-reaching implications of these tensions. "Washington proposes to sacrifice the remaining [100,000] Christians in Kosovo in order to earn Muslim support" in the Middle East, Spengler says (adding that such an effort to earn Muslim support seems futile). Serbia and her traditional ally Russia would quite reasonably prefer the Kosovo Christian areas, which are part of the traditional Serbian heartland, to be transferred to Serbia, but the UN/American plan for Kosovo insists on creating an independent Muslim-controlled country without dividing its territory . . . . CONTINUE

Iraq food distribution system failing?

2007-04-15T21:03:00.000-02:30

Here is a UPI article from April 11, which doesn't seem to have attracted much attention, describing a breakdown in Iraq's state-run food distribution program, on which a large proportion of Iraqis are more or less dependent. There are alleged to be problems with both lack of security, corruption and managerial incompetence. The Iraqi government is said to be refusing to acknowledge the scope of the crisis. An additional twist in this story is that the government is refusing for political reasons to transfer the PDS (food ration) cards of internal refugees to their new locations, as to do so would constitute official recognition of the population movements which are changing the ethnic and sectarian makeup of the different regions of the country. Thus many internal refugees are presumably going hungry.

Eric Voegelin (14)

2007-04-07T03:33:00.000-02:30

A guarded optimism

In his essay "Immortality: Experience and Symbol" Voegelin sketches what he regards as the decline of the West since the High Middle Ages—when religious doctrine separated from experience—through a series of "ever lower levels of spiritual and intellectual order" punctuated by wars and revolutionary chaos, ending in a contemporary "global madhouse". But he also descries a recent "progress of a sort" in the intellectual sphere, a development which ought to "become a living force, sooner or later, in the actual restoration of order" . . . . CONTINUE

Burke on vengeance

2007-04-05T00:09:00.000-02:30

The Commons of Great Britain are not disposed to quarrel with the Divine Wisdom and Goodness, which has moulded up revenge into the frame and constitution of man. He that has made us what we are has made us at once resentful and reasonable. Instinct tells a man that he ought to revenge an injury; reason tells him that he ought not to be a judge in his own cause. From that moment revenge passes from the private to the public hand; but in being transferred it is far from being extinguished. My Lords, it is transferred as a sacred trust to be exercised for the injured, in measure and proportion, by persons, who feeling as he feels, are in a temper to reason better than he can reason . . . . CONTINUE

On party discipline (3)

2007-04-02T03:12:00.000-02:30

In the first post in this series I claimed that a representative assembly could allow "horizontal" political pressure among the representatives (such as that found within internally democratic parliamentary parties) without losing its character as an independent check on the executive. This claim has to be qualified considerably . . . . CONTINUE

Karzai, the Taliban, and civil aviation

2007-04-01T00:18:00.000-02:30

This AP article may be a revealing glimpse of the Afghan state (though one hopes not). Afghanistan's state-owned airline, Ariana, is said to be days away from possible collapse due to corruption and mismanagement. "The collapse of the 52-year-old airline, which survived the Taliban regime despite international sanctions, would be a potent symbol of failure by the administration of President Hamid Karzai and would reinforce growing perceptions of corruption and incompetence." The article quotes an allegation by a former Ariana president that a "high-level government mafia wants Ariana to fail so officials can start—and profit from—their own airline."

In view of the absence of references to large passenger aircraft in the Koran, shouldn't it have been the Taliban who were unwilling or unable to run a modern airline?

The historical assassination of Burke

2007-03-27T02:57:00.000-02:30

Conor Cruise O'Brien describes in The Great Melody (1992) how the Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke was, until the First World War, a revered figure, his writings a storehouse of political wisdom for both British Liberals and Tories . . . . CONTINUE

On party discipline (2)

2007-03-27T00:25:00.000-02:30

In the preceding post on this subject, I was attempting to build up an argument in favour of a modified Westminster-type constitution under which "horizontal" party ties within the Commons might remain strong, but which would break the excessive power of party leaders over parliamentary parties by legally requiring that cabinets and shadow cabinets—the "front bench" of the Commons—be elected by backbench MPs . . . .

However, I have been having second thoughts about this . . . . CONTINUE

English nationalism vs. the BNP

2007-03-22T05:04:00.000-02:30

At the English nationalist site Steadfast can be found a 2004 article by Tony Linsell with some interesting criticism of the British National Party, or at any rate of many of its members (see jpegs of the scanned article here and here). He claims that the BNP has been backing what he sees as a dying horse in the form of British nationalism, which is based on an artificial British political identity, as opposed to English nationalism, which arises out of a true ethnic identity. "Britishness" has become identified with a multicultural society holding little appeal to Scottish, Welsh or English nationalists, while English nationalist feelings seem to be on the rise. BNP-style British nationalism appears, meanwhile, to be linked to a sense of White racial identity which Linsell rejects as "shallow and contrived" . . . . CONTINUE

An infinitely malleable patriotism?

2007-03-17T03:10:00.000-02:30

Clyde Wilson, at Chronicles Magazine, makes some claims about present-day American patriotism which ought to be controversial.

Surely there has never in history been any “patriotism” so disembodied as this allegiance to “America.” It is not even as substantial as allegiance to a “proposition nation,” which at least implies a theoretical construct that can be more or less described (even if deceitfully) . . . . CONTINUE

Conservatives for torture

2007-03-17T02:33:00.000-02:30

Michael Brendan Dougherty, in The American Conservative, writes that the devotion of many conservative pundits to the TV drama 24 and its protagonist Jack Bauer, and in particular their enthusiasm at Bauer's frequent use of torture as a counterterrorist tactic, indicates that "the conservative movement has become willing to sacrifice principle to passion and difficult moral reasoning to utility". . . . CONTINUE

A giant screw-up for mankind

2007-03-17T02:22:00.000-02:30

Catallarchy, citing January's Wired magazine, reports that NASA appears either to have lost or inadvertently destroyed the priceless master copies of the Apollo 11 moon landing footage. This leaves us with just the version that was shown on TV, which is so blurry that you can't really see what is going on (or at least that's how it appeared on my family's TV set in 1969).

A few years ago I also read somewhere that NASA had permitted the blueprints for the Saturn V rockets to be thrown out, meaning that it would be impossible to reactivate the production lines. This was said to be unfortunate because the Saturn V might have come in handy when the Space Shuttle turned out to be something of a dud.

On party discipline (1)

2007-03-15T04:27:00.000-02:30

With the rise of tight-knit, centrally controlled political parties, the Westminster model of government has turned into something approaching an "elective dictatorship". There is no longer an effective legislative check on the executive. An independent legislature still exists, on the other hand, under the American constitution, where party discipline is not so overpowering. Is there any way of restoring a strong legislature under the Westminster model, short of abandoning cabinet government in favour of the presidential form, or some even more radical change? . . . . CONTINUE

Conor Cruise O'Brien on Weil and hypocrisy

2007-03-10T22:04:00.000-03:30

From On the Eve of the Millenium, pp 101–102:

Hypocrisy indeed is inseparable from all forms of social life. No one can live with a really determined and consistent enemy of all hypocrisy. Molière made that point in Le Misanthrope, and Ibsen in The Wild Duck. In the twentieth century Simone Weil rejected the teachings of Molière and Ibsen as corrupting. She insisted on nothing but the truth, in her writings and in her personal life. Her most famous statement was a declaration of total disseverance, a rejection of all bonding. Said Weil: "Any sentence that begins with the word 'We' is a lie." It was a lie that she refused to tell . . . . CONTINUE

Democracy and war

2007-03-09T18:46:00.000-03:30

Conor Cruise O'Brien on the allegedly pacific character of democratic states (from On the Eve of the Millenium, 1994):

It is said that democracies are necessarily peace-loving because ordinary people love peace, whereas arbitrary princes and dictators use war and the threat of war as an instrument of policy. As a historical generalization, this has some flaws. Britain was already a full democracy at the end of the nineteenth century, under the forms of a constitutional monarchy. But the Boer War was immensely popular with the British public at its beginning in 1899, and remained so for most of its course . . . . CONTINUE

Eidelberg vs. Burke?

2007-03-06T03:51:00.000-03:30

(Revised 03/08)

In response to what he sees as the self-destructive incoherence of Israeli political leadership, Paul Eidelberg has proposed the establishment of an independent presidency . . . .

It appears that in terms of Mansfield's interpretation of Burke, Presidential government is an attempt to institutionalize rule on the pattern of the great statesman, without regard for whether such a statesman actually exists . . . . CONTINUE

Things that do not make sense

2007-03-02T23:31:00.000-03:30

Neither the philosophical nor political views of the New Scientist are my cup of tea, but here the magazine gives a fascinating list, from 2005, of thirteen potentially important scientific anomalies. One of these is that the "placebo effect" is so tangible that a drug which blocks the action of morphine can also be shown to block the action of a placebo which the patient thinks is morphine. (Which to me suggests that the effect of the morphine may have been as "psychological" as that of the placebo . . . ) Another anomaly is that the early deep-space probes, Pioneers 10 and 11, seem to have been tugged slightly off course by an unexplained force.

Mansfield on political parties

2007-03-02T23:21:00.000-03:30

Harvey Mansfield's Statesmanship and Party Government (1965) is a discussion of the contrasting ideas of Bolingbroke and Burke on political parties, with a preference for the latter. Bolingbroke sought to abolish parties—or at least, everyone else's parties; Burke, Mansfield says, saw a certain type of party as an imperfect but more reliable substitute for great statesmen, who might not be on the scene when they were needed. Burke's view was a fairly radical one in his day: previously only Machiavelli had spoken out in defence of parties . . . . CONTINUE

Glick on "Jihad's campus collaborators"

2007-02-26T21:38:00.000-03:30

Caroline Glick points out that certain American campus security services now seem to think they are branches of the Stasi. I wonder how they could ever have got the idea that their employers were totalitarians with an aversion to free intellectual exchange? . . . . CONTINUE

Edmund Burke on natural aristocracy

2007-02-26T04:35:00.000-03:30

A voice from a vanished age.

To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one's infancy; to be taught to respect one's self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; to look early to public opinion; to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the wide-spread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw the court and attention of the wise and learned wherever they are to be found—to be habituated in armies to command and to obey; to be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honour and duty; to be formed to the greatest degree of vigilance, foresight and circumspection, in a state of things in which no fault is committed with impunity, and the slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous consequences . . . . CONTINUE

Peter Hitchens on British tyranny

2007-02-21T00:47:00.000-03:30

Peter Hitchens argues that the British police are now more an instrument of elite control of a subject population than a means of defending that population against criminal violence.

. . . the one thing that will bring a rapid and powerful police response to a phone call is a claim that guns are being used by private citizens. And the one offence the courts will always punish severely is the one they call 'taking the law into your own hands'. Why? Because they are much more worried about their monopoly of force than they are about protecting us . . . .
I object strongly to the expression 'taking the law into your own hands'. The law is ours and we made it for ourselves, to protect us and govern us, as a free people. Our freedom to defend ourselves against criminal violence is part of our general freedom to live our lives lawfully. We hire the police to help us enforce the law, not to tell us that we cannot do so. Sadly, the modern British law is not our law, but an elite law, based on ideas which most of us do not share. And the modern police are the elite's police, not ours . . .

Henry Taylor on education for public life

2007-02-17T23:47:00.000-03:30

In the view of many, the problem of preserving a civilized order comes down to one of education. Classical liberals have always emphasized the need for an educated electorate if democracy is to be viable in the long term. More generally, however, a political or opinion-forming élite of some kind is inevitable, regardless of whether the polity is formally democratic or élitist; the real question is the nature of that élite—whether, for example, it is to set about overturning the traditional values of the civilization, or preserving them. And this will depend essentially on how the élite has been educated . . . . CONTINUE

Henry Taylor on popularity and humility

2007-02-16T21:51:00.000-03:30

Taylor (Statesman, Chapter 7) seems to achieve a synthesis of classical and Christian concepts of humility.

Popularity . . . . is most commonly obtained by an abuse of humility . . . . I say an abuse of humility, because humility well used consists in a constant reference to a high standard and a prostration of pride and self-love before that standard, whether it be merely ideal, or whether we see it embodied in men of virtue and understanding superior to our own: and it does not consist in any undue and untrue self-depreciation, leading a man to postpone himself to what is worse than himself, and thereby to desert his moral station . . . . CONTINUE

Advice on marriage from 1836

2007-02-16T21:46:00.000-03:30

"Let no man suppose that his character is strong and high enough to resist the influence of a lower character in a wife."—Henry Taylor, The Statesman.

Sounds like a parody, but isn't

2007-02-16T21:42:00.000-03:30

"Dr. Wairimu Njambi is an Assistant Professor of 'Women’s Studies' at the Florida Atlantic University. Much of her scholarship is dedicated to advancing the notion that the cruel practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) is actually a triumph for Feminism and that it is hateful to suggest otherwise. According to Njambi 'anti-FGM discourse perpetuates a colonialist assumption by universalizing a particular western image of a "normal" body and sexuality.'" (Brussels Journal)

The Red Guards strike again in Britain

2007-02-15T17:53:00.000-03:30

According to Cranmer (citing the Daily Telegraph), a Christian woman's application to foster children was rejected on the grounds that her beliefs prevented her from "fully accepting a child's sexuality if he or she were lesbian or gay" and that she would be unable "to actively promote another religion for a child". The founder of a charity to assist single mothers was refused a grant because "Your assistance for single parents includes extending Christian comfort and offering prayer". A local council is threatening to remove the grant of a trust that has ministered to homeless alcoholics for forty years unless it promises to say, "We will do nothing to promote our faith". Cranmer comments,

In the UK, around 20% of charities have a religious basis, and it is testimony to the faith that the vast majority of these are Christian . . . . They may no longer [exclusively?] employ Christians, for that is ‘discrimination’; they may no longer talk of their faith, for that is ‘anti-diversity’; and they may no longer explain their morality, for that is ‘intolerance’ . . . . New Labour has done more to undermine the Christian foundations of the United Kingdom than any previous government in history. The party that was built on sacred motives has become the most secular . . . .

Eidelberg on moral relativism

2007-02-14T22:33:00.000-03:30

A lengthy excerpt from Eidelberg's On the Silence of the Declaration of Independence (1976): . . . . CONTINUE

Valentine's Day greetings

2007-02-14T02:06:00.000-03:30

from batr.net (2006)

(click on image to enlarge)

Lee Harris on cosmopolitanism and patriotism

2007-02-10T21:00:00.000-03:30

(See preceding post) . . . . How is it possible for liberal cosmopolitans to claim the moral high ground in debate with political particularists? This, Harris implies, results from the prevailing intellectual habit of preferring abstract ideals to realities. The utopian ideal of a nonexistent world community is compared with a "living, breathing community of real men and women" and found to be superior. Such a comparison is "a bit like saying that the novel I intend to write one day will be far superior to War and Peace because of my intention to make my novel perfect".

The true choice facing us is not between particularism and liberal cosmopolitanism, but between "actual historical communities that embody the values of liberal civilization to a high degree and those that do not" . . . . CONTINUE

Lee Harris on historical forgetfulness

2007-02-10T01:46:00.000-03:30

One of the themes of Harris's Civilization and Its Enemies (2004) is the inherent danger to civilization of forgetting the prerequisites for its own existence. In particular, prosperity and security beget an unwillingness to risk one's individual or national life; but when one is faced with ruthless enemies, it will sometimes be necessary to take such risks in order to avoid enslavement and the destruction of one's civilization . . . . CONTINUE

A Russian looks at Britain

2007-02-06T21:02:00.000-03:30

Peter Hitchens quotes a handy summary of the current state of Britain by an unnamed Russian reporter.

Under its corrupt government, which is widely believed to sell seats in the upper house of parliament in return for contributions to ruling party funds, the once-free nation of Britain is rapidly turning into a police state. Pre-trial detention, once limited to 72 hours, is being repeatedly extended to far longer periods. Old rules about the accused being innocent until proved guilty are being cast aside. The right to silence has been abolished and so has the law which prevented anyone being tried twice for the same offence. The police increasingly take action against individuals for expressing opinions which defy 'political correctness', the official orthodoxy of the British state. The major churches claim that new laws discriminate against their freedom of conscience. The streets are under perpetual surveillance by closed-circuit TV cameras . . . . CONTINUE

Elaborating Eidelberg's election scheme

2007-02-06T03:48:00.000-03:30

As far as I am aware Eidelberg has not spelled out the details of his proposed combination of senatorial nomination and popular election of presidential candidates, other than to suggest that the senate nominate no more than three candidates (in addition, perhaps, to the incumbent, if he is eligible to run again). It is interesting to try to work out what these details might reasonably be . . . . CONTINUE

Britain is not doing well in Afghanistan...

2007-02-06T01:07:00.000-03:30

. . . in the judgment of Richard North of EU Referendum. He points out, among other things, that in a recent attack on Jugroom Fort to retrieve the body of a dead British soldier, "[élite] British forces were repulsed by a numerically inferior force of Taliban". However, North also believes that the British news media are so incompetent at reporting military matters that civilian observers must largely resort to reasoning from first principles in order to get any idea of what is going on. Such deductions about the state of affairs in Afghanistan are necessarily tentative.

Alternatives to Eidelberg's election scheme

2007-02-05T03:44:00.000-03:30

Eidelberg's proposal, in combination with some form of élite "senate" or upper legislative chamber, would be a method of choosing a chief executive who was both independent from the legislative branch and likely to be competent. It would accomplish this by relying on the senate to identify qualified presidential candidates, but making the successful candidate dependent on popular support to remain in office . . . .

Notwithstanding the indispensable role of the legislative branch, the choice of the chief executive is, as I think Eidelberg somewhere observes, the most crucial decision the political system must arrive at. Theoretically speaking, his proposal thus seems extremely important.

There are two or three other possible ways that I can see of achieving the same combination of competence and independence from the legislative branch . . . . CONTINUE

Painful transition to New Blogger (4)

2007-02-04T02:10:00.000-03:30

Your indulgence, dear reader(s). I've just spent most of the evening trying to get the much-touted new Blogger to work. I waited until Blogger kicked me off the old version, correctly anticipating that there would be many bugs in the new one for some time after it was made available. But even so, the new Blogger first displays a blank editing frame when I try to edit an existing post. The official help section suggests that I switch from my Opera browser to IE6 or Firefox. The Blogger technical people seem to look down their noses at anyone not using Firefox, but last time I checked Firefox it seemed too big for my machine. So, I download and install IE6, which takes the best part of an hour (and incidentally wipes out all bookmarks from IE5: nice going, Bill). Lo and behold, I can't even log in to Blogger with IE6 . . . . CONTINUE

Eidelberg on the "politics of compassion"

2007-01-28T22:16:00.000-03:30

A Discourse on Statesmanship is in large part a contrast between the politics of the American founders, especially Madison and Hamilton, and those of Woodrow Wilson, whom Eidelberg sees as the intellectual founder of a new American republic, greatly inferior to the original. Wilsonianism succeeded in transforming American politics so that it no longer aimed at justice or equality of opportunity, but rather equality of personal condition. The first Eidelberg sees as a felicitous synthesis of aristocratic and democratic principles, tending to protect the exercise of individual faculties by securing the economic differences to which they give rise; the second, as an unfettered democratic principle which ultimately leads to moral relativism . . . . CONTINUE

Rousseau on religion and the State

2007-01-27T23:38:00.000-03:30

In today's American Thinker, Timothy Birdnow highlights an important passage from Rousseau's Social Contract, which is presented at greater length below. Birdnow is interested in unearthing the roots of the Left-Islamic alliance against Christian values—Rousseau being a key to leftist viewpoints—but the passage is of wider interest as well . . . . CONTINUE

Eidelberg on diversity, tolerance, and patriotism

2007-01-27T01:32:00.000-03:30

In A Discourse on Statesmanship Eidelberg describes how the American Founding Father James Madison (whom Eidelberg rates very highly) favoured the establishment of a political orthodoxy centered around a standardized curriculum at institutions of higher learning, as a means of uniting the new, somewhat "multicultural" American republic.

Returning to Madison . . . it may be thought inconsistent of him to want to cultivate a political orthodoxy on the one hand, and "liberal sentiments" on the other. But Madison believed he understood the true principles of republican government and that these were embodied in the text he proposed for the University of Virginia's School of Politics. To imbue students with those principles would be to inculcate genuine patriotism, not national chauvinism. Properly understood, patriotism means a concern for the common good, a love of one's own people, their traditions, their institutions, their great men, their noble purposes. True patriotism is rooted in gratitude for the blessings which the past has bestowed upon the present . . . . CONTINUE

Eidelberg's proposal for an independent presidency

2007-01-22T03:25:00.000-03:30

The Jewish political thinker Paul Eidelberg (see preceding post) does not seem to be widely known, in part presumably because in recent years he has concentrated his attention on the political problems facing Israel. This obscurity is unfortunate, because those problems are apparently to a great extent shared by the West as a whole—though in Israel their gravity is deepened by the existential external threat to which the country is permanently exposed, as well as (it turns out) by deficiencies specific to the Israeli political system. Much of what Eidelberg says is thus quite relevant to non-Jews, even if he is no longer addressing them . . . . CONTINUE

Paul Eidelberg on radical democracy

2007-01-19T22:52:00.000-03:30

In an extended restatement of the thesis of Plato and Aristotle, Paul Eidelberg gives a compelling description of the transition from the democratic to the tyrannical phase of the "political cycle". It is from his Discourse on Statesmanship (1974), pp 63–68.

In the worst variety of democracy, there are no qualifications for voting or for holding office (apart from age, citizenship, and perhaps residence requirements). Accordingly, each individual has a right to an equal voice in public affairs. This fact alone has profound moral and intellectual consequences. First of all, it fosters the notion that one individual is as good as any other, that his opinions, or his likes and dislikes, are as valid as another's. Such a notion is utterly destructive of morality and even of rationality . . . . CONTINUE

Walkin' in a George Bush wonderland

2007-01-14T18:00:00.000-03:30

Parapundit relays an account from 2002, in the heady days of neoconservative imperialist plot-hatching.

I am reminded of what an unnamed senior adviser to George W. Bush told reporter Ron Suskind about people who try to form their opinions based on empirical evidence.
In the summer of 2002, after I [Suskind] had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: "Look, I want your vote. I'm not going to debate it with you." When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, "Look, I'm not going to debate it with you."

It used to be said that conservatives were those who based their position on historical experience, while liberals believed they could design policies using the power of reason. To this we must add a third category, the loonies who think that reality will defer to the force of their naked will.

Caroline Glick: an Israeli crisis of corruption

2007-01-11T21:15:00.001-03:30

The respected Jerusalem Post deputy managing editor Caroline Glick has an astonishing column from January 5th which deals with, among other things, the reasons for the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

Many outside Israel watched with amazement as the reputed right-wing hardliner Ariel Sharon handed over territory in Gaza, which contained long-established Jewish settlements, to the Palestinians, gaining nothing in return, and indeed inviting a stepped-up Arab militancy. According to Glick, the error of Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza was compounded by a simultaneous breach of the central principle of the peace treaty with Egypt: the demilitarization of the Sinai peninsula. The Egyptian forces now stationed on the border of Gaza have been permitting large-scale shipments of weapons into that territory from Lebanon, Iran and other sources. Together with a variety of other recent unfavourable developments, this is potentially catastrophic for the State of Israel.

Commenters on right-wing blogs, mystified by such behaviour, thought up ingenious explanations of how the withdrawal might be, for example, part of some devious plan to expose Palestinian government as corrupt, with a view to discrediting the Palestinian side in the eyes of world opinion. Glick, however, writes that Sharon's apparent conversion to the left-wing position on the "peace process" (more properly, "surrender process") was in fact the result of allegations of personal corruption. To save the skins of himself and his family, Sharon caved in to pressure from the leftist elites which dominate the Israeli media and judiciary, and which are evidently willing to use this power without restraint. This surrender on the part of Sharon was treasonous, whatever the validity of the original allegations—a subject which Glick doesn't write about here. The left at least honestly believed in the "peace process".

In 2003, Ariel Sharon and his sons found themselves on the brink of political, economic and personal destruction. Criminal investigations of their alleged corruption were coming to a head and it was widely predicted that Sharon and his sons Omri and Gilad would all be indicted on felony charges. A way had to be found to step away from the abyss. After advising with Sharon's personal attorney and chief of staff Dov Weisglass, Sharon and his sons chose to protect themselves by adopting the Left's irrational strategy of destroying Israeli communities and giving their land to terrorists. That is how the policy of retreating from Gaza and northern Samaria and carrying out the mass expulsion of Israeli citizens from the areas was born.
. . . . Overnight the media transformed Sharon from the corrupt politician to the visionary leader. As Amnon Abramovich, Channel 2's chief commentator explained, the media understood that corrupt or not, their job was to protect Sharon to make sure he threw the Jews out of Gush Katif. And as Supreme Court Justice Mishel Cheshin admitted in an interview upon his retirement, the Supreme Court justices would never have dreamed of acting against Sharon lest they endanger the withdrawal.

Sharon's betrayal prompted the resignation of the IDF chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Ya'alon, and the demotion of those who questioned Sharon's irrational policy. The result of this is that the top positions in Israel's cabinet, civil service and military are now occupied by "obedient, opportunistic and inexperienced yes-men". These include Olmert, the new Prime Minister, who was a minor figure in Israeli politics until promoted by Sharon, and the new IDF chief of staff Halutz—a friend of Sharon's son, and in Glick's judgment an arrogant incompetent, "unfit to command the IDF". Possibly, Glick says, Sharon did not anticipate quite how disastrous such promotions might prove, because he did not expect his own leadership skills to be made unavailable by a stroke.

The only bright spot in this story, Glick points out, is that Israel has an alternative principled and competent leadership consisting of those who were forced out or who resigned as a result of Sharon's Gaza decision. Otherwise, "Israel faces unprecedented threats to its security and very existence while it is being led by the most incompetent, corrupt leadership it has ever known".

Incidentally, the most convenient way I am aware of to subscribe to Caroline Glick's columns is via the Real Clear Politics RSS feeds (scroll about 1/6 of the way down the page).

Tashbih Sayyed: Why I am still a Muslim

2007-01-02T23:57:00.000-03:30

Many Western conservatives, having become familiar over the past few years with some unappealing aspects of Islam and its core texts, have grown suspicious of "moderate Muslims" who laud many Western values while retaining their allegiance to a religion which seems to contradict those values. If they are serious about Western values, why don't they leave Islam? Islamic dissident Tashbih Sayyed (whose website is here) provided one thought-provoking answer in an interview with Tovia Singer on the unofficial internet radio station Israel National Radio (direct link to mp3 here). Tashbih Sayyed expressed attitudes which were so pro-Jewish that they seemed to leave Singer nonplussed. Singer did, however, manage to ask why Tashbih Sayyed did not therefore simply convert to Judaism. Here is his response (as near as I can make it out from the rather poor-quality out-of-studio component of the audio recording):

[Laughs] If I become a Jew, I will give a weapon in the hands of radical Islamists, that he is criticizing us because he is a Jew . . . I believe in my Islam. I want to fight the radical Islam by remaining a Muslim, because I don't trust people who leave their faith. Everyone has to clean his own house. He cannot leave a dirty house and join a cleaner house, because the dirt will follow him. The dirt will corrupt the house that he joins.

America's real role in Iraq

2006-12-28T19:29:00.001-03:30

Parapundit has a devastating post on the inability of the United States to recognize the role it is now playing in Iraq.

Our soldiers are tasked with pretending there is a non-sectarian middle in Iraq that has control of the Iraqi central government. The idea is that if we just provide enough support and training to those officially part of the central government then the central government will become the more powerful middle against the sects and factions all around it. But there's no non-partisan center in Iraq. There's no objective and impartial civil service staffing the ministries. We are dealing with tribes motivated by clan loyalty which is sustained by the practice of cousin marriage.

Rather, as Mark Santora has written in the New York Times, "the Sunnis see the Iraqi military as agents of Shia ethnic cleansers and high level Iraqi government officials as obstructors of military operations that might hurt the standing of their factions." America is in a kind of semi-conscious alliance with the Shias—though this does not stop the Shias from killing American soldiers.

George W. Bush's coming big surge of US troops into Iraq will just train more Shias to fight Sunnis. The Shias will receive their training as soldiers in the Iraqi government. They will then proceed to use their skills and equipment to cleanse Baghdad of Sunnis. Some will do this while acting as Iraqi soldiers. Others will leave the Iraqi army and attack Sunnis in cooperation with the Shias who dominate the Iraqi security services. We call this "nation building".
If we were honest about the net effect of our actions we could at least help the Sunnis move away from the Shias so that fewer Sunnis would die in the process. But America's ruling elite and talking heads aren't up for that level of brutal honesty.

British officials saw no Iraqi threat

2006-12-20T22:04:00.000-03:30

This item from the Independent does not seem to have attracted much attention in conservative regions of the blogosphere. (For the Telegraph's version, see here.) It was revealed a few days ago that Carne Ross, former top British diplomat at the UN, gave secret testimony to a Commons committee in 2004 that the consensus in the British government, prior to the invasion of Iraq, was that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein had already been contained. "During my posting, at no time did [the Government] assess that Iraq's WMD (or any other capability) posed a threat to the UK or its interests", Ross said. Before the war there was no intelligence evidence that Iraq held significant quantities of biological, chemical or nuclear weapons, and no intelligence or assessment that Saddam was planning to attack anyone. This contradicts claims made by Tony Blair. Moreover, British diplomats repeatedly warned their American counterparts of the likelihood of Iraq collapsing into chaos following a régime change—and the Americans agreed(!) with this view. Ross also believed that there was insufficient attention given by the UK to stricter enforcement of the existing sanctions against Iraq, an approach which might have provided an alternative to war. Ross says that he resigned his position because of his misgivings about the legality of the invasion.

I came across the above via the usually high-quality libertarian blog Samizdata, whose attitude to the report was, however, dismaying. In effect, Samizdata responded with a "who cares?" to the Independent's assessment that Tony Blair had dragged Britain into a war by lying to his public. Samizdata does not appear to grasp that democracies cannot be sustained when clear and essential factual statements by their leaders cannot be trusted by their own peoples. What happens the next time a British Prime Minister, or American President, appeals to his citizens to back him in a struggle to defend the national interest? Why should anyone believe him when he points to vague intelligence which cannot, for reasons of national security, be fully divulged? But there are no other good sources of information available to ordinary citizens. Such moral failure on the part of leaders can be accepted with equanimity only by those who are under the delusion that we are immune from history, that never again will there be occasions when we genuinely must take up arms on behalf of our nations if they are to survive.

Candid opportunism from the BNP

2006-12-14T21:13:00.000-03:30

The Wikipedia article on the British National Party attributes the following tidbit to party leader Nick Griffin, in a speech from March of this year. (I haven't verified the quotation against the video record of the speech, which is available through a link at Wikipedia, but the article appears to be a more or less even-handed one.)

We bang on about Islam. Why? Because to the ordinary public out there it's the thing they can understand. It's the thing the newspaper editors sell newspapers with. If we were to attack some other ethnic group—some people say we should attack the Jews ... But ... we've got to get to power. And if that was an issue we chose to bang on about when the press don't talk about it ... the public would just think we were barking mad. They'd just think oh, you're attacking Jews just because you want to attack Jews. You're attacking this group of powerful Zionists just because you want to take poor Manny Cohen the tailor and shove him in a gas chamber. That's what the public would think. It wouldn't get us anywhere other than stepping backwards. It would lock us in a little box; the public would think "extremist crank lunatics, nothing to do with me." And we wouldn't get power.

Isn't Griffin openly admitting here that the BNP's policies towards both Muslims and Jews are dictated simply by political expediency, and that he would be quite prepared to switch to a pro-Islamic and/or anti-Semitic line if this appeared more likely to win votes? (Much as fellow far-rightist Jean Marie Le Pen appears to have done, across the Channel.) What is the source of this imperative of achieving political power, running deeper than mere expedients such as the reviling of particular ethnic groups?

Such opportunism is probably par for the course in politics. But it seems a great deal more dangerous where the party in question is one which openly embraces radical policies—when it is outside the Establishment, which, if it no longer seriously holds any principles, remains predictable by reason of inertia.

Response to "The Proper Response"

2006-12-09T21:11:00.000-03:30

Here's a comment I posted in reply to this article by Rebecca Bynum at The New English Review, which asks, "How do we do as Jesus commanded and love our enemies while at the same time preventing our culture and civilization from being destroyed" by those enemies?

There is a rather important difference, it seems to me, between individual non-resistance to evil and collective non-resistance. When a family member is being attacked, do you refuse to fight her attacker on the grounds that she ought to be behaving like a good little Christian and submitting? No, this is her decision, not yours; to turn it into your decision is a moral monstrosity (if it isn't merely cowardice masquerading as high-mindedness). The situation is quite different from when you are personally being attacked, in which case the decision whether to resist is yours. [Similarly,] as members of a political community we have no right to require our fellow-members to submit to aggression. More generally, I will go out on a limb and suggest that the decisions of the community should be based on justice, not charity. Charity is for individuals.
Christianity does not make this very explicit, probably because nobody until recently ever thought that political communities would be crazy enough to attempt to run their affairs on the basis of nonresistance to evil. My impression is that traditionally, both Catholic and Protestant Christianity arrived at ways of keeping nonresistance out of the public sphere; and that the recent tendency to apply it to political questions represents a dangerous innovation. Perhaps it also represents a return to pure, primitive Christianity. But then it has never been demonstrated that such Christianity is a viable basis for a civilization. For one thing, it was based on the idea that the world was about to end.

The ruthlessness of France

2006-12-04T20:46:00.000-03:30

Here (via American Thinker) is a Times of London review of a book about French complicity in Rwanda, Silent Accomplice. Author Andrew Wallis accuses the French government of being so obsessed with its diplomatic rivalry with Britain and other English-speaking countries—despite the one-sided character of this rivalry, whose Anglophone side is no longer really in the game—that it preferred to assist a Francophone government in Rwanda to commit genocide rather than permit the faction of the Anglophone Paul Kagame to take power. "[I]t seems there are many eyewitnesses of French troops assisting at torture sessions and catching Tutsis and handing them over to Hutus who hacked them to death before their eyes", while François Mitterrand memorably remarked of the mass killings, "Dans ces pays-là, un genocide ... n'est pas trop important." Several genocidaires, the review says, still live happily in France, whose élite have yet to admit to any wrongdoing in Rwanda.

This kind of behaviour prompts one to think about what would happen should the French élite come to regard the Muslim presence in their country as a threat, not merely to their prestige in a mostly symbolic "Great Game", but to their domestic power and privileges. Theodore Dalrymple some time ago made a remark along the lines that he expected the French ruling class to massacre their Muslim population rather than give up power. The present book review suggests that the French can be brutal and ruthless enough to do just that.

Separated at birth?


Episcopal Church USA head and octopus scientist Dr. Katherine Schori		Colonel Gaddafi

The legitimacy of nationalism

2006-12-01T00:15:00.000-03:30

Lukacs' position on nationalism (see the Nov. 18 post) strikes me as somehow awry, though perhaps this is because his exposition is difficult to understand.

"The [nationalistic] love for one's people is natural, but it is also categorical; it is less charitable and less deeply human than the [patriotic] love for one's country . . . akin to a love of one's family. Nationalism is both self-centered and selfish—because human love is not the love of oneself; it is the love of another. Patriotism is always more than merely biological—because charitable love is human and not merely 'natural'." Lukacs here seems, somewhat in the spirit of Simone Weil, to be deprecating nationalism as a collective egotism—which it undoubtedly is. Yet self-love, in some form, is healthy, and those who are inadequately endowed with it are pitiable. Christianity (and probably most of the higher religions) tell us to love others as ourselves, not to stop loving ourselves. It is not a refutation of nationalism to identify it with collective egotism; it merely implies that we ought not to let it get out of hand.

There may be some confusion here over what "love" refers to. It seems to be true that there is a basic psychological difference between love of the other and love of the self, whether individual or collective. From the little I have read about Lutheranism, I have the impression that Martin Luther was greatly struck by this distinction, and consequently ended up by condemning anything done merely for the sake of oneself. He seems to have transformed the principle "love others as yourself" into "love others and hate yourself". (In his mature view, one ought not to defend oneself against criminal attack, for example, except insofar as one is acting on behalf of the general welfare by doing so.) It sounds as though Lukacs may be thinking along similar lines. But if we are to distinguish self-love from the love of another in this way, we must then keep in mind that both types of "love" are necessary. The higher, charitable love of our country will probably only take us so far.

Update (12/14): Paul Cella has just posted a long article on the nature of (American) patriotism here (h/t: Eunomia).

A new basis for Russian foreign policy?

2006-11-24T20:08:00.000-03:30

From a recent Asia Times column by Spengler:

By mid-century the population of a political entity that in 1980 seemed destined to rule the world will have fallen by a half (in the case of Ukraine and Moldova) to a quarter (in the case of Russia). What remains of Russia stalks the world scene like a man whose terminal cancer leaves him no motivation save amusement and revenge.

In the same article, Spengler makes some interesting but highly debatable points about Christianity. The pagan element of Christianity, Spengler claims, is a handicap, not an advantage.

Christianity appeared as the gravedigger of traditional society, calling individuals out from their nations into a new people of God. Where it compromised too deeply with traditional society, through syncretic adoption of pagan elements, ultimately Christianity failed, as in the ex-Christian, neo-pagan continent of Western Europe. Where Christianity liquidated the languages, culture and memories of its converts, it flourished, uniquely in the case of immigrants to the United States.

This strikes me as wrong-headed. The apparent failure of Christianity in Western Europe has to a large extent coincided with the abandonment of the pagan elements in Christianity. Initially, after conversion, European cultures were not radically altered by Christianity; their pagan character eroded only over centuries, so that even today, within living memory, one has been able personally to observe the disappearance of residual pagan customs in European cultures. (In recent times this has perhaps been the consequence of industrialization and urbanization as much as of Christian hostility, or rather Christian negligence.) For example, until two hundred years or so upper-class Europeans and Americans would challenge to a duel anyone who offered them a serious insult; this was a pagan survival, not the product of a Christian ethos.

Christianity, or at any rate "pure", New Testament Christianity (such as Simone Weil espoused), does not seem to provide a complete cultural blueprint in itself; it needs some particular, traditional culture as its foundation. It is too other-worldly to stand by itself. Its proper role is to inform and elevate traditional culture, not to replace it. A Christian culture that forgets about its need for a pre-Christian foundation is likely doomed. Christian charity, to take one notable example, is self-destructive unless it rests on a foundation of justice. However, the idea of justice is pre-Christian; New Testament Christianity has nothing to say about it.

If Spengler is correct that the American (Evangelical Protestant) form of Christianity has the best prospects, it will be because that form of Christianity will rely on Biblical Judaism to furnish a foundation in a particular traditional culture.

John Lukacs on nationalism

2006-11-18T19:17:00.000-03:30

Lukacs' views from Democracy and Populism (Yale University Press, 2005):

Patriotism is defensive; nationalism is aggressive. Patriotism is the love of a particular land, with its particular traditions; nationalism is the love of something less tangible, of the myth of a "people," justifying many things, a political and ideological substitute for religion. Patriotism is old-fashioned (and, at times and in some places, aristocratic); nationalism is modern and populist . . . .
After 1870 nationalism, almost always, turned anti-liberal, especially where liberalism was no longer principally nationalist . . . . [p. 36]
. . . . One hundred and fifty years ago a distinction between nationalism and patriotism would have been labored, it would not have made much sense. Even now nationalism and patriotism often overlap within the minds and hearts of many people. Yet we must be aware of their differences—because of the phenomenon of populism which, unlike old-fashioned patriotism, is inseparable from the myth of a people. Populism is folkish, patriotism is not. One can be a patriot and cosmopolitan (certainly culturally so). But a populist is inevitably a nationalist of sorts. Patriotism is less racist than populism. A patriot will not exclude a person of another nationality from a community where they have lived side by side and whom he has known for many years; but a populist will always be suspicious of someone who does not seem to belong to his tribe . . . . [p. 72]
Since it appeals to tribal and racial bonds, nationalism seems to be deeply and atavistically natural and human. Yet the trouble with it is not only that nationalism can be anti-humanist and often inhuman but that it also proceeds from one abstract assumption about human nature itself. The love for one's people is natural, but it is also categorical; it is less charitable and less deeply human than the love for one's country, a love that flows from traditions, at least akin to a love of one's family. Nationalism is both self-centered and selfish—because human love is not the love of oneself; it is the love of another. Patriotism is always more than merely biological—because charitable love is human and not merely 'natural.' Nature has, and shows, no charity. [p. 73]

Lukacs sees nationalism as central to the history of the last century and a half. Stalin, for example, to Lukacs seems to have been essentially a nationalist, who relied on communism mainly because the communists (especially in Eastern Europe) were the only people who could be relied upon to obey him. Lukacs also regards "Americanism" as basically an American nationalist creed, not as patriotism (p. 161). Nationalism is not an entirely bad thing: where there is no allegiance to institutions, as for example in Latin America, populist nationalism is the only uniting force. But nationalism is a crude and dangerous basis for social cohesion, because of its "inevitable components of hatred and fear" (p. 164).

Steyn on the future of Europe

2006-11-14T23:45:00.000-03:30

Conservative columnist and author Mark Steyn sometimes says unwise things (such as in his recent recommendations that the United States should topple the Syrian government), but is frequently very insightful. Here he is being interviewed about the likely shape of things in Europe 20 years from now.

. . . you'll be switching on the TV, you'll be looking at scenes of burning and conflagration and riots in the street. You will have a couple of countries that are maybe in civil war, at least on the brink of it.

You will have neofascists' resurgence in some countries and you'll have other countries that have just been painlessly euthanized in which a Muslim political class has effectively got its way without a shot being fired—and large numbers of people, particularly young people, have left those countries and have moved on to whoever will take them.

. . . . there are really three groups of people in Europe among the native Europeans and they're split three ways. Some of them will decide to fight and turn to Neo-Fascism and some of them will just convert to Islam because it's going to win and they'll talk themselves into figuring they can be Muslim light and it won't make much difference and others will just head to sea . . . .

On why Europeans, generally more skeptical than Americans about the compatibility of Islam and democracy, seem so nonchalant about admitting large numbers of Muslim immigrants:

If Islam is incompatible with democracy, that's not a problem for Iraq, it's a problem for Belgium, you know, because Iraq until, you know, a few months back had no democracy to lose. They can easily adjust to the way it's always been.

For Belgium or for Denmark or for the Netherlands, they've got real democracies and they are likely to lose . . . . I think at some level there's something else going on there, too, that a lot of these [European] countries, you know,—we talk about the Middle East, democratize the Middle East - we forget Spain was a dictatorship 30 years ago, Portugal, a little over 30 years ago, Greece, same 30 years ago.

Italy and Germany and France, you've got to go back half a century, but in essence the idea of living under non-democratic regimes is not foreign to these people and I think they think of themselves, their identities less as Europeans are less bound up with ideas of liberty than it is for the U.S. You know, the U.S. is an ideological project in a way that Italy isn't and so I do think that also accounts for part of the way they look at it.

On the adoption of Islamic dress by European women:

It's certainly happening in some cities. I heard it anecdotally from two friends in the space of a week and I thought it was very interesting that in both cases—one woman extremely wealthy, well-to-do and the other woman just happens to be a poor divorcee living in a part of town that is rapidly Islamifying—but they both reported the same experience—you put on a head scarf and, you know, you don't have to wear the burka, but you look, in other words, you don't look like a full Wahabi woman from Saudi Arabia, but you look like say, an Egyptian lady or a Jordanian. You wear the head scarf and a head to toe dress or you're not showing bare legs, bare arms, uncovered hair. They were stunned at how much more relaxing it was to stroll across the park, stroll to the corner store. They suddenly felt far more secure, they felt far more safe, they weren't jeered at for being an infidel whore or anything—and I would imagine that, you know, it's not actually that big a stage from sort of passing for Muslim in the street to actually embracing it in some kind of way of residual way at least nominally for the advantages of a quiet life.

"EU Referendum": BNP is the new mainstream

2006-11-12T19:52:00.000-03:30

This is a must-read article for anyone interested in British politics. Richard North, the astute editor of the blog "EU Referendum", begins by listing a number of Labour politicians who have warned in recent months that there is a groundswell of support developing for the extreme-right British National Party among working-class English whites, who feel forgotten about or betrayed by the Labour Party that formerly represented them. North backs this up with an array of respectable election results for the BNP in recent British elections; in particular, he notes that in the 2004 European Parliament elections, the BNP and another so-called "fringe" party, UKIP, between them scored 32.6% of the vote.

Parties which can do this well at the polls should no longer be dismissed as irrelevant. Yet that is precisely what the mainstream British media persist in doing, North observes. "[N]ewspapers (and other media organs) which were once the bellwether of public opinion have so far diverged from their readers, listeners and viewers that they now represent the opinions only of themselves." And the political class (perhaps because they get their information from those media) has "lost the ability to 'read' its own electorate." An editorial in the latest Sunday Telegraph blithely asserts that "No reasonable person disputes that . . . the British National Party is repellent." But, repellent or not, the BNP is the sole party that is seen to be serious about dealing with the growth of militant Islam in England—a growth that has now, for example, produced 30 simultaneous Islamic terror plots that MI5 says it knows about. The BNP, North concludes, is not only becoming representative of the actual opinion of the British public, as opposed to that of its élites; it is becoming the only party representative of that opinion.

It is leaving our politicians and their parties like beached whales, stranded on the shores of their own ignorance, complacency and arrogance, supported by a media which itself has completely lost the plot.
That puts us in uncharted waters but, amazingly, the politicians still think they are in command. So insulated from reality are they that they haven't even begun to realise that they are heading for the rocks and that the passengers have disconnected the wheel from the rudder.

Another triumph of Canadian justice

2006-11-06T19:18:00.000-03:30

According to Stéphane Massinon of the Halifax Daily News, Cory Wright, to be charged today in the first-degree murder of a U.S. Navy sailor, also stabbed another man 14 times waaaay back in 2002. At that time, he attacked barber Matthew Barton, continuing to stab him once he had fallen to the ground, and knifing Barton's girlfriend's shoulder for good measure. Barton had apparently asked Wright to leave a party he was giving. The prosecution requested a 12-year sentence for Wright, but the Nova Scotia Supreme Court judge saw fit to give him 15 months (in addition to time already served), perhaps because Wright promised him that he would "turn his life around". This is why Wright was out on the street last Saturday, when the unidentified American sailor was stabbed, apparently while trying to break up someone else's fight.

U.S. wargames predicted Iraq mess

2006-11-05T19:36:00.000-03:30

The National Security Archive of George Washington University has just released the declassified report of wargames held in 1999 by the United States Central Command (CENTCOM), then under General Anthony Zinni, which had the aim of assessing the potential outcomes of an invasion of Iraq. According to the National Security Archive, the After Action Report of the Desert Crossing wargames was a production in which a number of major government agencies, including both the State and Defense Departments, participated. The report drew pessimistic conclusions regarding the outcome of an Iraq invasion, some of which—for example, societal "fragmentation along religious and/or ethnic lines"—were "interestingly similar to the events which actually occurred after Saddam was overthrown." It "stressed that the creation of a democratic government in Iraq was not feasible", and regarded a pluralistic government including "nationalist leaders" as the best that might be expected. The consensus of the report's authors was that there would be no unilateral U.S. intervention "except under the most dire circumstances such as WMD use or catastrophic humanitarian disaster." The report stresses the need for extensive planning for the occupation phase of any intervention in Iraq, and that the report itself should be no more than a starting point for such planning.

Gen. Zinni retired shortly after the report was written. He has stated (see links provided at the NSA site) that the report was quickly forgotten by those agencies with an interest in Iraq, including CENTCOM itself.

(The NSA site gives prominence to what seems to be a later claim by Zinni that he envisaged an occupation force of 400,000 in Iraq, more than twice the number of troops actually sent in by Donald Rumsfeld. However, I did not see this number in the non-searchable After Action Report posted by the NSA. In fact, at one point, while discussing the perceived U.S. threat to Iran, the report refers to a force of "up to 300,000 ground troops in the region").

Europeans through Asian eyes

2006-11-01T20:13:00.000-03:30

Here is a comment posted at Dhimmiwatch in response to an article by Paul Belien discussing the view that "Europeans who love freedom, [had] better emigrate", in view of the steady Islamization of that continent.

We see them here in Thailand all the time now. They look vaguely shell shocked, these Europeans. They come here with what wealth they have and open restaurants, try to start businesses or find something to do. Countries like ours that need foreign investment tolerate them. For now. At some point when we don’t need them any more they will be made to move on. But to where? They should settle in places like Australia or New Zealand where they can better fit in than in Asia. These people are the new Jews of the 21st century. The funny thing is when you ask them why they moved here they never mention they are displaced, they always talk about high taxes, too many rules, or something vague, they don’t even seem able to say why they don’t want to stay in their homes anymore. It is sad but we don’t want our blood polluted by their weak genes.

(I don't know whether this is representative of a significant slice of Thai or Asian opinion, though I suspect it is.)

Halpern: Cracks in Arab unity?

2006-10-28T23:50:00.000-03:30

Also via FrontPage magazine, an extraordinary article by Micah Halpern, who has noticed a sudden appearance of cultural self-criticism among leading Arab figures.

Muslim Fundamentalism is being chastised for turning the Arab world into a violent world. Muslim Fundamentalism is being blamed for altering the very fabric of Arab life and turning every facet of Arab life into an act of destruction.
Muslim Fundamentalists are being reminded that they are neither the ultimate nor the only decision making force when it comes to Arab lifestyle, Arab life or Arab diplomacy.
The fear of intimidation is gone. The fear of destroying the myth of Arab unity is vanishing. The fear of an Arab world bent only on violence and destruction has become too great to suppress. By embracing violence and by turning violence into their primary means of problem solving, both internally and in dealings with the outside world, the Arab world has severely diminished not only the way they are perceived by the outside world, but also the way in which they perceive themselves.

Halpern gives only two examples to back up this important claim—and one of them is a statement by Hosni Mubarak, who has (as far as I am aware) always been a political opponent of Muslim Fundamentalism. On the other hand, his other example comes from within the Islamist camp itself: from a spokesman for none other than Hamas. Halpern cites Dr. Ghazi Hamad, in the Palestinian weekly Al-Ayam, as wondering, among other things, whether his (Palestinian?) society is suffering from a "chronic illness of violence". Halpern comments, "Truly, this is one of the first times in a very long time that I am hearing material of this critical nature coming out of the Middle East. The best and only serious self-critique we have heard has, until now, come from ex-pat Muslims musing from the safety of the West . . ."

FrontPage magazine on "Al-Qaeda's nukes"

2006-10-28T22:48:00.000-02:30

FrontPage has an alarming discussion (October 27) of the threat of nuclear terrorism on U.S. territory, which, FPM suggests, is quite real. Various reputable sources have reported that Al-Qaeda has purchased tactical nuclear weapons, and nuclear materials, from the "Chechen Mafia" and other ex-Soviet suppliers during the past 10 years, according to journalist/author Paul Williams. Williams also believes that this "small arsenal" is being maintained and even further developed by Pakistani nuclear experts. "Few military and intelligence officials question bin Laden's ability to launch his plan for the American Hiroshima", says Williams. People evidently have difficulty conceiving of such an event, however, so "precious little is being done to avert it." Large numbers of cargo containers capable of carrying nuclear weapons continue to enter American ports, without inspection in 96% of cases, professor Harvey Kushner points out. The detonation of even a small nuclear weapon at an American port would not only kill thousands of people, but devastate the world economy as all port traffic was shut down to avoid further such attacks.

It seems that there are also credible reports that "nuclear demolition charges"—suitcase bombs—were hidden on American territory during the Cold War by Soviet agents, and that these could fall into Al-Qaeda's hands as a result of ties between that group and members or ex-members of the Russian intelligence services. Disturbing though this is, it may actually be less of a danger than the importation of new nuclear weapons into American territory, as such weapons become largely inoperable after being left unattended for a few months.

Michael Gove: the virtue of the nation-state

2006-10-25T21:46:00.001-02:30

An excerpt from British Conservative MP Michael Gove's new book, Celsius 7/7:

. . . our security depends crucially on a recognition of the vital importance of maintaining the nation state, as ideal and reality. The nation state, as organizing principle of political life, is central to Western thought and achievement. If political authority is to be exercised fairly, scrupulously and for the common good, then it has to be held accountable . . . . The nation state is the political community that most effectively allows for the exercise of accountability.
Within a territory bound by common ties of language, history and culture, political leaders are able to make an appeal for shared sacrifice, whether it is asking for the taxation necessary to help the poorest or, at moments of greatest peril, calling on citizens to risk their lives to defend others. Without those common ties, appeals to sacrifice will not resonate, calls to forfeit individual freedom for the greater good will not receive a ready answering call. And without a common understanding of who we are, and why we stand together, political leaders cannot lead.
If we grow tired of a leadership . . . we need a mechanism to effect an alteration in course. The only effective mechanism that human nature and history have shown can allow such a change to take place without civil strife is the operation of liberal democracy. And the only political community in which liberal democracy has flourished—can flourish—is in a nation state. Because it is only in a nation state that leaders and citizens enjoy a sufficiently strong bond of fellow feeling, where the conversation between them can be made intelligible to both sides through shared experience, aspirations, language and assumptions (pp 74–75).

One probably cannot generate much patriotic spirit through such "universalist" arguments—arguments which do not appeal to any love of one's own particular nation; but perhaps one might persuade intellectuals at least to stop trying to destroy that spirit.

(Revised post)

Frederic Lamond: the essence of monotheism

2006-10-19T23:07:00.000-02:30

Is the following excerpt nonsense, or a flash of genius?

Until 3,000 years ago, all religions were pantheistic and polytheistic as Hinduism, Taoism and Shinto still are. They tolerated the religions of other tribes and cultures, recognising in their worship the same divine energies as their own, albeit with different names.
Why then did patriarchal, monotheistic religions arise in the Middle East 3,000 years ago, and spread in their Christian forms throughout Europe and then on to the European colonised overseas territories during the last 1,500 years? Why did these monotheistic religions fight so fiercely to eradicate nature worship in the lands they controlled? Why did Christianity promote a dualistic antagonism between the spirit and the flesh, with only the former conceived as being in the "image of God"?
. . . . the answer came to me in a sudden flash of insight. The evolution of the universe and especially of life on earth has been the product of a dialectical antagonism between two forces of nature:
One is the highly conservative power of love, which seeks to maintain all living species and ecological equilibria just as they are at any given point in time, and is embedded in the genetically inherited instincts of all living species, including humanity. This power is generally represented by one or more goddesses and fertility gods in those religions that anthropomorphise cosmic and earthly energies.
The other, a force of destructive creation, which seeks forever to upset existing equilibria in order to create new and more highly evolved forms and species. In a universe in which the total amount of energy is constant and can neither be added to nor reduced—although it can be converted to matter and back again—neither God nor man can create anything without destroying something else. This is the power the Jews call Jehovah, the Christians—God the father, Muslims—Allah and Hindus—Shiva.
Power is neither evil nor undesirable. If only the force of love existed, the universe would never have moved from its original state of undifferentiated nothingness. But if only the force of destructive creation existed, the whole universe would be like the Sun: an endless series of thermonuclear explosions creating new elements, but which last only a few microseconds before dissolving again in the fiery furnace.
We owe the process of evolution on earth—in which continents, mountains, plants and animals have appeared and live actively long enough to experience their own life, but which can also slowly evolve in succeeding generations—to the ongoing delicate balance between these two antagonistic cosmic forces.

Lamond thus agrees with Simone Weil and other Marcionites that the God of the Old Testament is, contrary to orthodox Christian opinion, not the God of love at all; but Lamond differs radically from the modern Marcionites in that, having recognized God's terrifying character, he does not reject Him as the figment of a primitive religious imagination. To Lamond, such a God seems necessary to the existence of the universe as we know it. At this point Lamond's position is reminiscent of that of the "social Darwinists". He seems to be indicating a way by which apparently absolutely irreconcilable views of the nature of the cosmos might be brought into some kind of agreement.

Lamond's "flash of insight" came shortly after his initiation into the Wiccan religion in 1957 (a few years after witchcraft was legalized in Britain). I obtained the excerpt via the Nepalese blog Elahar.

". . . . Thus says the Lord of hosts, 'I will punish what Amalek did to Israel in opposing them on the way, when they came up out of Egypt. Now go and smite Amalek and utterly destroy all that they have; do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.'"
. . . . But Saul and the people spared [King] Agag, and the best of the sheep and of the oxen and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them . . . .
The word of the Lord came to Samuel: "I repent that I have made Saul king; for he has turned back from following me, and has not performed my commandments." (I Samuel 15.)

Peter Hitchens on "cultural Marxism"

2006-10-17T23:30:00.000-02:30

Peter Hitchens, in the Daily Mail, notes that there is some tentative rethinking of sex education going on in Britain, though far too late in his view.

The official excuses for sex education are extraordinarily feeble. The real purpose of this mental poison and immoral preaching is to debauch children by smashing up the moral values they have received at home or in church. Its inventor, the Hungarian Bolshevik [Georg] Lukacs admitted this. His followers do not admit it even to themselves—hence the ludicrousness of their official position.

He is onto something here (though the "church" reference doesn't seem very applicable in present-day Britain). "Cultural Marxism" is somehow able to make great strides, as though it were a gigantic conspiracy—and yet there are no conspirators, or at any rate not many of them. Most "cultural Marxists" would be bemused or indignant at being called by that name. One is reminded of Keynes' saying, "The ideas of economists and political philosophers . . . are more powerful than is commonly understood . . . . Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."

(inspired by a remark of Ectomorph)

A "green" form of nuclear energy

2006-10-13T21:20:00.000-02:30

Here (via Pajamas Media) is a fascinating Cosmos Magazine article about thorium-fuelled nuclear reactors. Thorium, unlike the fissionable form of uranium, is available in vast quantities, according to James Hudnall. Thorium is a nuclear material that cannot sustain a chain reaction unaided, and so poses little danger of a meltdown accident. It also produces relatively small quantities of nuclear waste, and the waste it does produce stays radioactive only for a few hundred years, as opposed to thousands of years in the case of a conventional reactor. Burning it in a reactor does not produce plutonium or other "weaponizable" material (which, one suspects, may be why relatively little money has been invested in the technology); a thorium reactor would in fact be a good way of "incinerating" plutonium from surplus nuclear weapons.

The problem in using thorium is how to stop the nuclear reaction from fizzling out. Two possibilities are proposed. First, a small amount of "seed" uranium or plutonium can be inserted in the thorium to serve as a source of neutrons. This kind of fuel combination could be used with existing reactor designs. More radically, it has also been proposed that a thorium reactor could run on neutrons generated by a particle accelerator, rather than by a nuclear reaction. In this type of reactor an uncontrolled chain reaction would be impossible. Such reactors could also be freely sold without any danger of promoting the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

China planning to take over N. Korea?

2006-10-12T23:21:00.000-02:30

This item from The Korea Times, 'China Distorts History to Prepare for North's Collapse', does not seem to have attracted attention in the Western media. It reports that Dr. Andrei Lankov, a professor of East Asian history in South Korea, has observed that China has been publishing a series of articles claiming that the Koguryo and Palhae kingdoms, from one to two thousand years ago, which had territory in both northern Korea and China, were part of ancient China. This "history offensive" began in 2003. Lankov believes that this probably indicates that China is preparing for an intervention in North Korea following the collapse of that country, with articles such as these being used as psychological and cultural justifications for it. The North Korean élite might welcome the installation of a Chinese puppet regime in Pyongyang, Lankov suggests, as this is the only way they would be likely to preserve their privileged position in the event of a national collapse. (Via Google News.)

See also Lankov's "Legacy of long-gone states" in the Asia Times (Sep. 16).

Robert Kaplan, writing in October's Atlantic Monthly, is thinking along somewhat similar lines. (" . . . China's infrastructure investments are already laying the groundwork for a Tibet-like buffer state in much of North Korea, to be ruled indirectly through Beijing's Korean cronies once the [N. Korean régime] unravels.")

Is Dalrymple soft on crime?

2006-10-11T23:30:00.000-02:30

Theodore Dalrymple's CBC podcast (see preceding post) is worth listening to even if one is already familiar with most of the ideas and anecdotes in it from his articles in City Journal and elsewhere. One of his statements, however, seems highly questionable. In response to the interviewer's question about a solution to the problem of the recent appearance of pervasive criminal violence in English society—violence which now imposes a de facto curfew on old people, for example—Dalrymple says,

I think that the law can do quite a lot, but it can't do everything; and in any case, one doesn't want a population that behaves in a reasonable and civilized way only because it fears that if it doesn't, there'll be a tap on the shoulder and they'll be taken off to prison. First of all I don't think that's possible, but secondly it would be very unpleasant even if it were possible.

In other words, Dalrymple seems to be saying that one shouldn't attempt to rely on increased penalties to curb criminal behaviour, even where those penalties would successfully cut crime rates, because one wants citizens who behave in a civilized fashion out of their free will rather than out of fear of the state.

If so, this is as crazy as the ideas of the liberal intelligentsia whom Dalrymple spends so much time criticizing. A state of public order maintained by the fear of criminal sanctions is, indeed, not an ideal one. But to insist on the ideal here, where there is no demonstrated means of achieving it, is mere progressive utopianism. If a society has a choice between pervasive criminal activity and coerced law-abidingness, it is the latter that is preferable. Would you prefer to be knifed in the street, or for your prospective assailant to be deterred from knifing you by the fear of jail or other punishment? One can reasonably go further than this, and ask whether it is not better for the assailant himself to be prevented from committing crimes, even by the gross threat of punishment, than to be allowed to commit them unhindered. I don't think traditional morality would have had any hesitation in saying that deterrence is preferable from this point of view as well.

Under the present régime of derisory penalties for various serious criminal offenses in England (I'm not aware of the situation in Scotland), the short answer to the question "What is to be done about English crime?" should presumably be, "Crack down on it." It is alarming that this idea seems to be too tough for even one of Britain's most independent-minded writers to swallow. If the present ruling establishment refuses even to contemplate such measures, make no mistake: there are fascists waiting in the wings who will be only too happy to assume the responsibility for imposing them.

Dalrymple on CBC

2006-10-11T01:46:00.000-02:30

Mirabile dictu! CBC Radio's Ideas has done a long interview with Theodore Dalrymple (first broadcast earlier this year). Podcast (52 minutes) available here.

Is British society Western civilization's "canary in the mine"? A British psychiatrist and writer traces the descent of a culture towards wanton self-destructiveness and alerts us to the new face of barbarism.

(H/t Daimnation.)

Dalrymple on contemporary Europe

2006-10-06T22:24:00.000-02:30

Theodore Dalrymple, in a review at the Claremont Institute of some recent books on the European attitude toward radical Islam:

It is scarcely any wonder that, when faced by people who, quite mistakenly and with a combination of staggering ignorance and arrogance, believe themselves to be in possession of a truth that justifies almost any atrocity committed, if not by them, exactly, then by those whom they have indoctrinated, modern Western Europeans do not know how to react. They have either forgotten what it is to believe in anything, to such an extent that they cannot really believe that anyone else believes in anything, either; or their memories of belief are of belief in something so horrible—Communism, for example, or Nazism—that they no longer believe that they have the right to pass judgment on anything. This is not a strong position from which to fight people who, by their own admission, hate you and are bent upon your destruction, brought about preferably at your own expense. First, you can't take them seriously; second, you suspect they might in any case be right.

Byways of the Internet (1)

2006-10-05T01:26:00.000-02:30

Nova Roma (see introductory Wikipedia article) is a "Roman revivalist group" created in 2751 a.u.c.—that's 1998 for those innovators who use the Christian calendar. It is "dedicated to the restoration of Classical Roman religion, culture, and virtues." According to Wikipedia, ~~barbarians~~ outsiders regard it as one of a number of internet-based "micronations", but some of its members emphasize more its educational and religious goals. It broadly resembles the better-known Society for Creative Anachronism, but is "much smaller", with about 1000 members. Nova Roma's administration is conducted under a constitution resembling that of the Roman Republic. Her territory is as yet limited to her "symbolic world capital", an undeveloped 10-acre ranch in Western Texas. ("This area of Texas", they note optimistically, "is very similar to parts of such ancient Eastern Provinces as Dacia, Moesia and Armenia.") Her special-interest groups (sodalitates) include one dedicated to gladiatorial combat, but as this is "held in as safe a manner as possible" it sounds a bit of an anemic affair; they also seem reluctant to bring back slavery for some reason, and have given women voting rights.

Nova Roma's State religion is the cultus Deorum Romanorum: "The cultus Deorum Romanorum is the pre-Christian religion of Rome. Sometimes called "Roman Paganism", the modern practice of the cultus Deorum is an attempt to reconstruct the ancient faith of Rome as closely as possible, making as few concessions to modern sensibilities as possible. As with other forms of historical reconstructionist paganism, every attempt is made to rely on actual historical and archaeological evidence, and interpolations are made only when the primary sources are silent, and then we strive to be consistent with them." (Other religions are also tolerated, though, they promise.)

A case of nationalist idolatry

2006-09-30T00:53:00.000-02:30

Here is what is, to all appearances, a remarkably clear instance of insane, power-worshiping, destructive nationalism of the kind embraced by the Nazis. It comes, however, from Canada in 2005. The Epoch Times then reported that

. . . support for [Major-General] Zhu [Chenghu]’s nuclear threat against the U.S. is alive in Canada’s Chinese communities, where many who grew up under Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda view the statements as proof of their homeland’s new strength.
The “New Horizon,” a tabloid-size periodical produced by the Chinese Professionals Association of Canada (CPAC) ran a story on page 3 of its August 5 edition praising Zhu’s speech.
“Zhu Chenghu’s theory of a nuclear war for the first time vividly describes how hundreds of cities east of Xian and in America could be destroyed,” the article said.
“This can be seen as the nuclear ideal and goal of the Chinese people since China first developed nuclear technology. The nuclear force is the power of a state, and the power of a state cannot lack a goal.”
CPAC claims membership of 20,000 Chinese professionals in Canada, ranging from accountants to zoologists. The organization was part of a recent welcome dinner for China’s new ambassador to Canada.

The maximum power of a state is paramount, even if the only opportunity for exercising it is in wiping out most of the state's own population centres. A reductio ad absurdum of nationalism.

(See also Simone Weil and nationalism)

St. Augustine: Roman patriot?

2006-09-27T00:16:00.000-02:30

Samuel Dill, though a Christian, admits that there is some truth in the ancient Pagan charge that Christianity, especially in the highly ascetic form which it assumed in the latter Roman Empire, sabotaged Roman civilization. He cites, for example (Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, p. 10), St. Paulinus's letter to a Roman soldier, encouraging him to give up the service of the beleaguered Empire in favour of that of God. "In this epistle the ascetic ideal is expounded with a breadth and absence of qualification which shock and amaze the modern reader . . . . Christian obedience is boldly represented as incompatible with the duties of citizenship and the relations of family life. The love of father or mother, of wife or child, the desire for riches or honour, devotion to one's country, are all so many barriers to keep the soul from Christ . . . . The soldier is a mere shedder of blood, doomed to eternal torment . . . . If [asceticism] was the highest form of Christian life, as its devotees proclaimed it to be, then Christianity was the foe, not only of the old religion, but of the social and political order which Rome had given to the world."

St. Augustine, perhaps the most influential Father of the Western Church, was greatly concerned to rebut the pagan charge that Christianity had led to the downfall of Rome. Unlike Paulinus, Augustine denies that the Gospel is opposed to war waged justly and mercifully. Roman cultural decay predated the coming of Christ; Christian virtue provided a way out from decadent Roman vice. Christianity protected Rome even in defeat, since the barbarian conqueror of the city of Rome was a Christian and "respected the altars of the Christian basilicas" (p. 55).

Yet, Dill points out, Augustine did not satisfactorily reconcile Christianity with Roman patriotism. Augustine, "a true Roman at heart", is proud of Rome's past and her great achievement, the welding of the West into a single people. At the same time—much like Simone Weil—he views Roman history largely as one of crime, of brigandage writ large. The Roman gods were real, but they were demons.

How could a true Christian be proud of such a past? Rome may have been chosen by God for Empire, but to admire her for this, one would have had to admit at least some goodness in her motives: one does not admire a criminal for accidentally bringing about some benefit completely opposed to his intention. (Believing in the existence of Rome's "demons", one would have had to admit that they were not entirely evil. This would presumably have meant an approach to paganism. Apparently, only once the pagan gods have died can a Christian consistently admit some goodness in pagan culture.)

The Brussels Journal on democracy and the left-Islamic alliance

2006-09-26T01:40:00.000-02:30

Two interesting posts up at the invaluable BJ. Here, Paul Belien considers the implications of Eastern European disaffection with democracy, as exemplified by the rioting in Hungary. If politicians lie in democracies, is it because the voters do not want to hear the truth? "The welfare state corrupts the voters, the voters in turn corrupt the politicians, and the politicians corrupt the voters even more by maintaining the welfare state. It is a vicious circle, which can only be broken when the welfare state collapses under its own inherent deficiencies. This will happen as soon as the money runs out with which the Santa Claus state finances the gifts and benefits that its corrupt electorate demands. That moment may be nearer than we think. Belgium, the archetype of the corrupt welfare state, is falling apart . . . "

In Patterns in the Politics of Extremism, George Handlery notes that the left-Islamic alliance now seen in Europe, which is somewhat mystifying to conservative observers, can actually extend even to Islamic countries such as Yemen, where Islamists and Communists recently allied to defeat the government in an election.

Update (9/30): Here is a more in-depth look at the vicissitudes of the Leftist-Islamist relationship, from Fred Halliday of the London School of Economics.

Simone Weil and nationalism (4)

2006-09-26T00:07:00.000-02:30

Some comments on Weil

Weil's proposed Christian nationalism is in most respects an attractive idea, and something resembling it should doubtless be encouraged. However, it seems likely that such a nationalism, if it had to stand on its own, unsupported by more traditional nationalistic motives, would prove to be somewhat feeble. Yes, it is a good thing to value a country as a means to the satisfaction of the needs of individuals, and to treasure it all the more because of its fragility in the face of historical forces. On the other hand, regarding a nation solely in such utilitarian terms is perhaps insufficient to produce a citizenry who are disposed to sacrifice themselves on its behalf. Nor, probably, is everyone capable of appreciating the beauty inherent in fragility.

In renouncing the admiration of power, Weil is probably making a serious mistake. If we do not admire strength, we may not bother to cultivate it, even if it is necessary as a means to other ends we do support. It is natural and healthy to admire strength and to wish to be strong. The key, as classical ethics (as described by Josef Pieper, for example) would recognize, is to subordinate strength to higher purposes, rather than to idolize it as the supreme end; this is true on the national as well as the personal level. We ought to acknowledge that power, physical or otherwise, is a gift and a responsibility, rather than something that is created by and at the disposal of our own egos. Admittedly, to look on power in these ways may be difficult, especially where our grasp of higher values is shaky, as nowadays. Perhaps the Romans suffered only limited harm by deifying national power, because they were for most of their history polytheists, and so could keep other gods in mind as well.

Weil's attitude to the Romans strikes me as wrongheaded and dangerous (though it is apparently also backed by another major thinker, Bernanos). It is reminiscent of those leftists who denounce as "fascist" everything to their right on the political spectrum. Rome was not Nazi Germany. Nazi Germany was revolutionary; Rome was profoundly conservative. Nazi Germany's "thousand-year Reich" was a mere advertising slogan; Rome really did endure for a thousand years and more. Rome had a concept of justice, even if it was inferior to ours in some respects; the Nazis jeered at the name of justice. Rome contributed a knowledge of government and law to the world; the main scientific contribution of Nazism was probably in the theory of manipulation of minds through propaganda. The power-lust of Rome in its age of imperial expansion did not extend to the totalitarian organization of life.

In rejecting the cultural legacies both of pre-Christian Rome and of Judaism, Weil is in effect espousing an etherealized Christianity, one that has no foundation in worldly existence—though she does open the possibility of restoring such a foundation by accepting the Greek side of the classical inheritance. It has been pointed out by F. Schuon, for example, that Christianity is an esoteric religion that has been extended to the masses. Such a religion is probably viable only in combination with an exoteric foundation, which might, in the case of Christianity, be drawn either from classical culture or from Judaism. What happens if one rejects this foundation? One is then left with an extremely demanding religion whose requirements few people are capable of meeting. Such a religion scarcely distinguishes between the radically evil and the ordinary: both fall short of the critical level necessary for salvation of the soul. In practice, the consequence of this is that the adherents of the religion, unwilling to face the prospect of near-certain failure, will falsely claim to have reached the high spiritual level the religion prescribes. That is, they will go about aping the behaviour of saints. This "spiritual deception" (as the Orthodox Church would term it) seems always to have been a hazard in Christianity, but it may be an even worse one in a post-Christian society that is unconscious of the Christian sources of its basic beliefs. (If it is unaware of its Christian roots, how can it become aware that the version of Christianity it is working from is defective?) We in post-Christian society have rejected the serious study of ethics—which we could obtain from the discarded classical component of our cultural heritage, by turning towards Judaism, or perhaps from the non-scriptural traditions of the older churches—but are left with a few fragmentary Christian ideas such as "turning the other cheek" and the equality of souls. Attempting to apply these ideas in a political context, by imposing them on the average citizen, is likely to prove disastrous. "Turning the other cheek", for example, will turn into the institutionalization of cowardice. Weil's Christianity seems to be much more seriously held than than the ethics of most contemporary liberals, but it might turn out to have much the same effect if one tried to make it the basis of the political system.

One "esoteric" aspect of Christianity is its emphasis on inward thoughts and motives rather than merely on outward actions. If one attempts to apply the Christian standard of purity of motive to national history, one runs into difficulties. Most historical deeds, Weil would undoubtedly agree, are probably not performed out of pure motives; also, it is difficult to uncover other people's motives, especially those from the scantily documented past. There may be a tendency systematically either to overrate or (as more recently) to undervalue the motives of figures in the national history. It would seem necessary, in describing a patriotic national history, to concentrate on concrete actions, without worrying much about the motives behind them. But Weil would presumably not find this to be adequate for encouraging a true Christian patriotism.

It seems to be generally accepted that great historical accomplishments are usually brought about by people whose motives are probably, for the most part, rather sordid and short-sighted. Weil's understanding of Christianity apparently excludes such accomplishments from the category of the admirable. It is of no account, for example, that the Romans united the known world into a single peaceful and ultimately Christian society: they were motivated primarily by self-glorification, so their achievement is, spiritually speaking, merely a useless by-product of sinful worldliness. This is not, however, the only possible Christian interpretation of history. One can also regard a nation which accomplishes something great, even if out of obscure and probably not very laudable motives, as a chosen instrument of Providence. "By their fruits ye shall know them"—not by their motives as interpreted by long-distance psychoanalysis.

Is not the possession of such a Providential role a legitimate basis for national self-respect? If one's culture has achieved great things, this should suffice to oblige one to fight to preserve it, without demanding to examine the inward states of the architects of those achievements, to see if they pass muster with one's own refined moral sensitivity—a sensitivity which incidentally is very cheaply purchased when one only needs it for debunking heroes, not for individual self-examination. This is not the only basis for a legitimate patriotism, but it is one that seems to be missing from Weil's patriotic palette.

The fruits of bureaucratic benevolence

2006-09-22T20:05:00.000-02:30

From Samuel Dill, Roman Society in the Last Century of the Western Empire, London, 1898, p. 234 (a book recently cited in the Ottawa Citizen):

The system of bureaucratic despotism, elaborated finally by Diocletian and Constantine, produced a tragedy in the truest sense, such as history has seldom exhibited; in which, by an inexorable fate, the claims of fancied omnipotence ended in a humiliating paralysis of administration; in which determined effort to remedy social evils only aggravated them till they became unendurable; in which the best intentions of the central power were, generation after generation, mocked and defeated alike by irresistible laws of human nature, and by hopeless perfidy and corruption in the servants of government.

. . . CONTINUE

Dill believes that socio-economic mismanagement on the part of the state was the direct cause of Rome's collapse (though he also points to a cultural malaise which might, in turn, have been the reason such mismanagement went unchecked). He argues that although there was a widespread aversion to and contempt for military service in the latter days of the Empire, what military forces the Romans did retain continued, right up to the end, to be markedly superior to their barbarian opponents, on a man-for-man basis. Rome had simply wrecked the economic foundation necessary to support an adequate military establishment.

In 356 an immense multitude of the Alemanni inundated Eastern Gaul. Julian, the future Emperor, who was then a mere youth, with no previous training in the art of war, was in command of only 13,000 men, of whom few were veteran troops. Yet in a very short time not an enemy was left in Gaul, and the victors were carrying the war far into the heart of Germany . . . .
Of the same character were the great invasions of the opening years of the fifth century. A great army under Radagaesus, which, according to the lowest estimate, numbered 200,000 men, crossed the Alps and penetrated into Etruria. That the government regarded the danger as serious, may be inferred from the edict which called the slaves to arms. Yet Stilicho, with a force of only 30,000 regular troops, and some Hun and Alan auxiliaries, signally defeated that great host . . . .
The invasion of Attila in 451 was probably the most appalling danger, in respect to the numbers of his motley host, which the Romans had had to face for ages. Aetius had only a handful of troops under his command, and although he was able to rally to his support Visigoths, Franks, Burgundians, and Saxons, yet the credit of defeating that fierce and crafty power, which had reduced all central Europe to vassalage, must be awarded to Roman daring and organisation. In the last days of the independence of Auvergne and of the Western Empire, a mere handful of troops under the gallant Ecdicius, and raised by his own resources, kept the Visigothic army for months at bay, and the Romans showed in this final struggle an almost contemptuous recklessness. (pp 240–242.)

Simone Weil and nationalism (3)

2006-09-20T01:24:00.000-02:30

A Christian patriotism?

The Nazi menace served to concentrate the minds of Weil and others, not only on the dangers of European nationalism, but on the need to preserve a patriotism strong enough to resist foreign aggression. France rapidly disintegrated when invaded by Germany, despite having a military force that was on paper strong enough to defend herself successfully. It is widely acknowledged that this failure reflected a deep malaise in French society that developed in the years before the war, a malaise that left the French divided and uncertain whether they had anything worth risking their lives to defend.

Weil attempts to describe a form of patriotism that does not violate her conception of Christian morality. First, it would recognize that the nation had no value in itself, but solely as a vital medium benefitting its inhabitants. Human beings have basic needs (some of which Weil describes in unfamiliar ways) which can be met only with the help of the state. We should support the state only as a means of fulfilling our unconditional obligations to look to the needs of our fellow human beings.

These obligations are to all human beings, not just to our fellow nationals; thus, any action by the state that unjustly hurts foreigners is to be opposed. In this respect, Weil would seem to agree with our contemporary liberals who regard the state as a kind of local representative of the interests of mankind in general, with no special duty to its own citizens; at any rate, this conclusion is certainly derivable from Weil's argument. Weil seems to deny the natural feeling that we owe more to fellow-citizens than to the inhabitants of unfamiliar lands on the other side of the globe. The concept of universal moral obligation is, I think, a view with a respectable Christian pedigree. Only now, however, do some people in positions of power seem to be using it to justify their policies.

Regarding one's country as a "vital medium", Weil persuasively points out, would avoid the "contradictions and lies which corrode the idea of patriotism." One would no longer regard the country as uniquely valuable, but would acknowledge the legitimate interests of other such vital media. One would also recognize that one's country had been produced by causes in which both good and evil were mixed up. Since one's country would no longer be considered an absolute good in itself, it would be unnecessary to pretend that its history was unblemished. It might even be of lesser value than those societies formerly existing in its territory, which had been destroyed in the nation's drive to power; nevertheless, since those societies cannot be reconstructed, the existing nation is the only available "vital medium", and it must still be considered precious. This temperate form of patriotism would, however, encourage political decentralization as a means of partially healing the wounds formerly inflicted on distinct local cultures. It would also support limited internationalization of political power. The cult of the nation-state, by contrast, is opposed to both of these forms of diminution of national power.

Weil's other major proposal is that Roman-style patriotism, the pagan worship of national power, should be replaced by a Christian compassion for one's country. She regards Joan of Arc, who said that she felt pity for the troubled kingdom of France, as the great model for this alternative patriotic ethic; also, Jesus demonstrated it when he wept over the fate of Jerusalem. As St. Joan showed, such compassion does not preclude warlike energy. As a man is capable of heroism in the protection of his children or aged parents, so should the citizen be capable of heroism in the defense of his imperilled country.

The key here is that Weil's Christian love is a love for fragility, and perhaps beauty. One can love what is fragile, but one will not idolize it; love for the strong is inherently idolatrous. We are permitted to love fragility and beauty in the world, but worship of strength must be reserved for the supramundane. One has the choice of loving France for her apparent permanence or as something which may be destroyed; patriotism must be restricted to the latter form. (One might note here that this also "solves" the problem of nationalism in small nations. It is ridiculous to idolize one's country when it is small and insignificant in the world—though this has not stopped people making the effort—but it is relatively easy to regard such a country as vulnerable.)

Weil believes that this new form of patriotism must be inculcated by reforming the system of public education. If children continue to be taught to admire greatness of the Roman type, if we continue to honor (in Weil's view) essentially evil men, not only do we give those men exactly the kind of victory they sought, we also invite our most energetic children to emulate them.

As far as I can see, Weil does not succeed in putting together a reformed educational program, though she makes some interesting suggestions in this connection. One problem she discusses is the need to recount genuinely good acts in our national history for us to emulate: without the study of history, there can be no patriotism. The difficulty is that few such actions are good enough to meet Weil's moral requirements; moreover, most such events will go unrecorded. In French history, for example, she can come up only with the examples of Joan of Arc and of those little-known Catholics of Béziers who sheltered heretics at the cost of their own lives. Besides eking out what little true goodness there is in the historical record, students will therefore have to be taught to love that which has disappeared from the record, Weil proposes. Such a suggestion seems to lend itself to ridicule. In lesser hands than Weil's, such a concept is also likely to produce "people's histories" which serve us up with pseudo-heroes who are not morally outstanding, but merely mediocre in their accomplishments.

Simone Weil and nationalism (2)

2006-09-18T03:11:00.000-02:30

Weil's condemnation of conventional patriotism

Weil points out that patriotism or nationalism, for all its importance in human affairs, has been written about very little (at least in French). Conventional wisdom (see e.g. Reck-Malleczewen) has it that patriotism only appeared with the French Revolution, but patriotic feeling was often very intense in the Middle Ages; patriotism is a modern development only in the sense that in the Middle Ages the object of patriotism was not the nation-state exclusively, but could shift between one's village, town, province or "nation" (France), Christendom or mankind. The French Revolution cemented a purely national patriotism both by abolishing local and Papal rivals to national authority and, Weil says, by transforming monarchical absolutism, which over the centuries had produced a great deal of suppressed anti-patriotic feeling among the French, into republican rule. "Those who had been French by force, became so by free consent." (Those inhabitants of the Vendée not slaughtered by the Revolutionary armies would probably have had a thing or two to say about that.)

The (more or less) free consent of the governed does not, however, guarantee the benign character of the modern kind of patriotism. Such patriotism is directed towards the State, despite the cold, unlovable character of that State, because the State tends to kill off every rival object of political affection. This lack of attractive alternatives exposes all of us to "moral torment". In destroying rival institutions, the State also "eats away the moral substance of a country. The German state is strong because it is new." (Rauschning would agree with this, at least in the German context.) The worship of an all-powerful centralized State is nothing more than "loveless idolatry".

Weil would go further than this. Not only is French- or German-style State-worship idolotrous; so is the love of one's country, one's people, if it is turned into an absolute good. Weil believes that Judaism, with its idea of the "chosen nation", is guilty of this form of idolatry. (Indeed, she speaks as though tribalism did not exist before the Jews came along. A similar criticism might presumably also be aimed at the English or Americans, who traditionally did not regard the State as all-important, yet similarly regarded themselves as exceptional nations. Clearly, however, it is difficult to tell in such cases where proper self-regard ends and idolatry begins. It is reasonable to argue that the Jews, the English, the Americans and various other nations besides have all had unique, important contributions to make to the world.)

Further, a people or any other collectivity for Weil has no real existence, or at any rate none comparable to that of the human individual. She claims that Plato "found the right expression when he compared the collectivity to an animal." Patriotic love for one's collectivity, for its own sake, is therefore as debased as adoration of an animal. A rather vicious animal, in fact: "The superior prestige of the nation is bound up with the exaltation of war. It furnishes no motives for action in peacetime except in a regime which constitutes a permanent preparation for war".

Patriotism also entails idolatry of the (collective) self, a practice cultivated by the ancient Romans, Weil's other bête noire. This is pride, and so the worst of all sins in Christian terms. "In the soul of a Christian, the presence of the pagan virtue of patriotism acts as dissolvent." The French pro-Catholic Right of the 1930s, for example, was corrupted by the view that patriotism trumped morality. There ought to be no pride in empire—or at any rate not in the French empire, since empire-building is not part of France's national vocation (which incidentally is "thinking on behalf of the world", Weil believes).

Weil sees no essential difference between the conventional patriotism of her own day, as seen for example in France, and the Nazi type of nationalism. Both are based on the worship of national military power. She emphasizes this basic point by going as far as to claim to admire Hitler for having the courage of his convictions, in contrast to the more inhibited citizens of liberal countries, who do not go beyond "a base submission of the mind" before the idol of national military greatness. "Once one recognizes something as being a good, one should want to seize it. Not to want to do so is cowardly." (This was a fairly dramatic way of putting things considering that Weil was at the time employed by the Free French government.) Hitler was the natural product of a society whose popular writers held up as role models such figures as the Roman dictator Sulla.

Simone Weil and nationalism (1)

2006-09-16T00:56:00.000-02:30

Simone Weil, a French "unbaptised Catholic" of Jewish background who died in 1943 in England, at the age of 33, is considered by many to be a brilliant writer and a saint, one of the few great spirits of the age. Her saintliness is questioned in this essay, however, which points out that she chose to impose (ultimately fatal) hardships on herself, ostensibly out of compassion for suffering proletarians and for Frenchmen under occupation; yet, when the position of French Jews became unpleasant, she reacted by protesting to the authorities that she did not deserve to be classified as Jewish. T.S. Eliot, in his introduction to Weil's The Need for Roots, admires her soul and her intellect, but also criticizes her as something of a universalist on the one hand and a Marcionite heretic on the other; that is, rather than seeing Christianity as standing out by its superiority to the other major religions, she saw Judaism—together with the religion of the ancient Romans, whom she also hated—as exceptional in its inferiority. She avoided close relationships and her personality appears to have been marked by an intense self-loathing.

The Need for Roots, which she wrote just before her death, is a wide-ranging attempt to lay the foundations for a new political order in France. It contains a great deal that seems to be unwise: for example, she wished to suppress the work of authors who published demonstrably incorrect statements, even though this would surely have had the effect of eliminating all books of any interest—in particular her own, which is full of dangerous generalizations, and has to be regarded as a fertile source of hypotheses rather than of truths. Nevertheless, even if one regards the book as nonsense, it is of significance because it represents in rather pronounced and clearly argued form some of the beliefs about nationalism which have become prevalent since World War II. Weil was admired by some of the leading writers of the postwar period (see the link to the essay above), so it is a reasonable guess that her attitudes to nationalism have been not just indicative, but influential in intellectual circles. The book also contains some interesting, though to my mind very incomplete, ideas about how one might construct a Christian alternative to traditional nationalism. I will ignore here the large amount of material in the book that does not seem to bear on the question of nationalism.