Thought for the day (and month, year, decade)...

"If a conservative order is indeed to return, we ought to know the tradition which is attached to it, so that we may rebuild society; if it is not to be restored, still we ought to understand conservative ideas so that we may rake from the ashes what scorched fragments of civilizations escape the conflagration of unchecked will and appetite."

-Russell A. Kirk (1918-1994)

Rebuilding a civilization one brick and one soul at a time...

I am not reading the news much. It's too glum. The "party line" is that the world sucks. When things get better, and they will, Barack Obama will become, at least on television, the greatest president since FDR. In 2012, if you are against President Obama, it will be because you are a racist and a reactionary who wants to turn back the clock not to the 1990s Silicon Valley, but to 1960s Birmingham or 1930s Chicago. I can only hope that the mainstream media's voice is largely silenced by the economic crisis, but that probably is too much to ask.



Recent writings by Peggy Noonan remind me that some holy orders, in particular, the Benedictines, are built not for the way the world should work, but the way it does, that is, it collapses in gloom, panic, recession, and war. The Benedictines do what they do century by century. They rebuilt Europe after A.D. 476, and if necessary, they will rebuilt the entire world, one soul and one brick at a time.

Here are some of Noonan's comments today:

'Perhaps the biggest factor behind the new pessimism is the knowledge that the crisis is not only economic but political, that we'll have to change both cultures, economic and political, to turn the mess around. That's a tall order, and won't happen quickly. One thing for sure: Our political leaders for at least a decade, really more, have by and large been men and women who had fortunate lives, who always seemed to expect nice things to happen and happiness to occur. And so they could overspend, overcommit and overextend the military, and it would all turn out fine. They claimed to be quintessentially optimistic, but it was a cheap optimism, based more on sunny personal experience than any particular faith, and void of an understanding of how dark and gritty life can be, and has been for most of human history.'

Here is a link to the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia.

Still hoping some grown-ups will rescue us...

I have been down most of the week; perhaps it's just the winter blues. Perhaps I'm overworked, which is fortunate because many aren't working and don't expect to be working.

Peggy Noonan feels the same and opines:

'A major reason people are blue about the future is not the stores, not the Treasury secretary, not everyone digging in. It is those things, but it's more than that, and deeper.

'It's Sully and Suleman, the pilot and "Octomom," the two great stories that are twinned with the era. Sully, the airline captain who saved 155 lives by landing that plane just right—level wings, nose up, tail down, plant that baby, get everyone out, get them counted, and then, at night, wonder what you could have done better. You know the reaction of the people of our country to Chesley B. Sullenberger III: They shake their heads, and tears come to their eyes. He is cool, modest, competent, tough in the good way. He's the only one who doesn't applaud Sully. He was just doing his job.

'This is why people are so moved: We're still making Sullys. We're still making those mythic Americans, those steely-eyed rocket men. Like Alan Shepard in the Mercury rocket: "Come on and light this candle."

'But Sully, 58, Air Force Academy '73, was shaped and formed by the old America, and educated in an ethos in which a certain style of manhood—of personhood—was held high.

'What we fear we're making more of these days is Nadya Suleman. The dizzy, selfish, self-dramatizing 33-year-old mother who had six small children and then a week ago eight more because, well, she always wanted a big family. "Suley" doubletalks with the best of them, she doubletalks with profound ease. She is like Blago without the charm.'

I have almost given up on my own generation. There are few political figures in either party of my generation that give me confidence that pension funds, social security, banks, insurance companies, bonds, or securities are safe. Outside of David Petraeus and a few others, I am not confident we can fight off the barbarians within or without.

I can only hope that the young people and their officers who have risked their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan will rise up, cut the crap, and silence the shrill weenies who pretended they were going to change the world in 1968 and have nothing to show for it but film clips and reunion tours.

Blogging light... lost in Facebook

I just signed up and am busy contacting people with whom I once played in sandboxes and on ball fields.

"Benedict's Tragedy and Israel's"

Spengler, sometimes over the top, sometimes cynical, is in his game here.

I have not commented yet on Pope Benedict XVI's lifting of four excommunications. I saw them as pastoral matters with political fall-out, not political matters. Of course, I actually believe that the Church is more than political thing. The news media does not believe in the Church's transcendence, so its response was quite predictable. I wish more than a few commentators could distinguish between being allowed to take communion (John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi) and being endorsed in all one's behavior. As I know from many of my Protestant friends, it upsets many people that any religious body claims to have such authority, and they will protest whenever it is used or threatened.

An excerpt from Spengler:

'The "traditionalist" enemies of Vatican II whom the Pope hoped to reconcile stem from a dark corner of European politics, as George Weigel reported in a January 26 Newsweek column [2]. Weigel notes, "[Archbishop] Lefebvre was also a man formed by the bitter hatreds that defined the battle lines in French society and culture from the French Revolution to the Vichy regime. Thus his deepest animosities at the council were reserved for another of Vatican Council II's reforms: the council's declaration that 'the human person has a right to religious freedom', which implied that coercive state power ought not be put behind the truth-claims of the Catholic Church or any other religious body."

'That is the lost world of "throne and altar" conservatism, the arrangement whereby the Vatican in effect delegated power to the Catholic dynasties of Europe. The term "traditionalist" is entirely misleading, however. France emerged as the dominant European power at the end of the terrible Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648, and overthrew Europe's ancient political order, founded on a universal Christian Empire and a universal Catholic Church. In response, the Vatican reluctantly ceded authority to Catholic monarchs, as Professor Russell Hittinger of the University of Tulsa has shown [3]. Inevitably, this concession by the Vatican led to nationalist churches, what Hittinger has called "the churches of earthly power" [4]. The Vatican's response to 1648 contributed to Europe's descent into nationalism and world war.

'Because Archbishop Lefebvre had the Apostolic authority to create other bishops, his four schismatic followers to whom Benedict offered communion in the Church (but not episcopal function) remain bishops, under Canon law. The small Lefebvrist movement is a schism, a wound in the Church that the pontiff must attempt to heal. It complicates matters that Benedict XVI agrees with the Lefebvrists that Vatican II was wrong to remove the Latin mass in favor of a vernacular liturgy. As a universal language spoken by no particular people, Latin embodies the universalism of the Church. By allowing any congregation to return to the Latin mass, Benedict has offered a remedy.

'Even though the Lefebvrist association repudiated Bishop Williamson's anti-Semitism, it is no accident that a paranoid anti-Semite would turn up in their ranks rather than in the Catholic mainstream. Throne-and-altar conservatism embodied some profoundly unpleasant elements, including clergy who supported the pro-German Vichy regime in France, as well as some who supported Adolf Hitler.'

As for me, I am a JPII Catholic. He embodies the Church as I see it, want to be received by it, and want to participate in it.

When a community activist meets sharks not protected by U.S. law or force

Caroline Glick writes on the first tests of Barack Obama as a world leader.

200th Anniversary of Charles Darwin's Birth

Here is a thoughtful piece by a thoughtful British historian, Paul Johnson. An excerpt:

'The atheistic pantheists who have now taken to advertising their beliefs on buses stand close to those who wish to deify Charles Darwin, and have taken the opportunity to do so on the 200th anniversary of his birth. Of course they are not the first. Leslie Stephen, a former clergyman who lost his faith as a result of On the Origin of Species, 'admired Darwin as a god', and some of the things he wrote, about his centrality in modern intellectual history, have the flavor of the Apocalypse. Much rubbish is currently being published about Darwin as a 'super-scientist' and 'transcendental prophet of the humanist triumph' (two expressions I have noted in the last week, one on the BBC). They do not do the poor man justice, for he was not only a fine scientist but a modest man of rare decency and dignity who would have found his current apotheosis repellent and frightening. If ever a good man needed to be saved from his followers, it is he.'

I really hoped President Obama would be better than Carter...

The stimulus package in its lack of imagination is worse than the Carter plan in 1977. It's so bad it's put the Republicans on the rebound. That's not to say they are strong, but it shows that the Democratic Party, despite a decisive victory in November, is more serious about passing out favors than in prudently ruling the country. Peggy Noonan says:

'Meanwhile, the inquest on President Obama's great stimulus mistake continues.

'His serious and consequential policy mistake is that he put his prestige behind not a new way of breaking through but an old way of staying put. This marked a dreadful misreading of the moment. And now he's digging in. His political mistake, which in retrospect we will see as huge, is that he remoralized the Republicans. He let them back in the game.

'Mr. Obama has a talent for reviving his enemies. He did it with Hillary Clinton, who almost beat him after his early wins, and who was given the State Department. He has now done it with Republicans on the Hill. This is very nice of him, but not in his interests. Mr. Obama should have written the stimulus bill side by side with Republicans, picked them off, co-opted their views. Did he not understand their weakness? They had no real position from which to oppose high and wasteful spending, having backed eight years of it with nary a peep. They started the struggle over the stimulus bill at a real disadvantage. Then four things: Nancy Pelosi served up old-style pork, Mr. Obama swallowed it, Republicans shocked themselves by being serious, and then they startled themselves by being unified. But it was their seriousness that was most important: They didn't know they were! They hadn't been in years!'

I have to pity a president whose legislative program is under the control of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

UPDATE: The stimulus bill is rotten. It is simply a wish-list of unfunded projects including virtually everything but the "bridge to nowhere." Moreover, while it is possible that an understimulated economy might respond favorably to stimulus, much like a dour person might respond to stimulants, this economy is like a cocaine addict worn out by stimulation. There is no quick fix to an economy, already at war, having dozens of major business plans, from the NYT to GM, which are simply obsolete. If Uncle Sam tries to force the reallocation of capital to the priorities of Congress, the recession will last longer and be more painful. Uncle Sam's stimulus has already failed economically: war and security spending, the federally-guaranteed housing bubble, and the lack of restraint by Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

I post Peggy Noonan often. She and I hope President Barack Obama succeeds.

Sitting out the Super Bowl tonight...

The commercials are so rotten for an eight year-old that we switched to Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader and then to Tom & Jerry.

I hope NBC loses money. It does not have to be this way.

"The Very Model Of Lucidity: An appreciation of Avery Cardinal Dulles, 1918-2008"

George Weigel writes:

'That modesty of intellectual purpose went hand in hand with a charming modesty of person. One does not often see cardinals of the Holy Roman Church walking across campus in cheap blue windbreakers; the cardinal's sartorial style would have caused grimaces at Wal-Mart, let alone Brooks Brothers. This was not an affectation, however, nor was it some kind of eccentric noblesse oblige. Avery Dulles took a vow of poverty when he entered the Society of Jesus and he kept it, as he kept his vows of chastity, obedience to superiors, and that special obedience to the pope that St. Ignatius Loyola intended to be the distinguishing hallmark of Jesuit life. Every dime of his royalties went to the Jesuits; as for patching the holes in one's shoes, well, duct tape would do just fine.

'Although John Paul II had long been in the habit of naming elderly Catholic theologians to the cardinalate as an expression of the church's gratitude for their service, Avery Dulles's nomination as a cardinal came as a surprise to many—and posed something of a dilemma to him. The night the announcement was made, my wife and I were entertaining friends who were also close to Father Dulles. As dinner began, the phone rang: it was the newly nominated cardinal, who brushed aside my congratulations and asked whether it was possible for him to be dispensed from the requirement in canon law that a cardinal be ordained a bishop; I assured him that a dispensation would be readily given, as it had been for others like him. There was an audible sigh of relief at the other end of the phone. It was all another expression of the man's humility.'

Read the piece. It is a remarkable story how one member of a prominent American Presbyterian family became a Jesuit priest and a Catholic cardinal.

[Above: For his coat of arms, Scio cui credidi ("I know in whom I have believed").]