Nietsche, Post-Modernism, and the Love of Death in the Pursuit of Power

David Warren:

'Let me fix upon this word "perverted," for both Anders Breivik and Osama bin Laden have shared in an advanced conception of "justice." Each went to extraordinary lengths to justify what he was doing.

'Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and the rest, were never so naked as to appear in public without a justification. It is not given to human beings to be free of moral conscience - for once again, there is a natural moral order. A person can stop justifying his own behaviour for no longer than he can hold his breath, and the coldest-blooded killer ever born is entirely human in that respect.

'This distinction is crucially important. The moral sense - the sense of right and wrong - is not something a person has or doesn't have. He always has it. The question is whether it has been twisted. It becomes twisted, perverted, when we begin to think the end will justify the means; that we ourselves have the gift to discern "the greatest good for the greatest number."'

Great piece. If you reject the idea of evil, all you have left is therapy unanchored to any type of law.

Is a church sanctuary for us or for God?

Fr. Dwight Longenecker:

'[T]he church should speak of the qualities of the One who dwells there. So the Catholic Church should be beautiful. How do we make it beautiful? We can make it beautiful by putting pretty things in it, but this is only ornamentation. For a church to be truly beautiful it needs not just pretty things in it; it has to be beautiful from the depth of its design. The beauty can’t be just skin deep. It has to be integral to the building as a whole. It has to be beautiful from the ground up and has to be designed from the beginning as a beautiful building.'


No, it's not about us.

Reason, Doubt, and Conversion

Fr. Dwight Longenecker:

'Apparently you can't reason a schizophrenic out of his belief. What he is seeing and hearing is 'real' to him. This is not to call all atheists schizophrenic, but the analogy is there--because in a similar way you cannot reason him out of his seemingly rock solid perception of reality: that there is no God.

'The only thing that can change a schizophrenic is something that alters the chemicals in his brain back to the proper function again. Similarly, the only thing that can convert an atheist (or an agnostic or an unbeliever of any kind) is the divine light--revelation--grace--a supernatural gift which opens blind eyes.

'Now what really teases me is that the same thing can be said about a theist who has never really examined their belief system. They too have accepted a rock solid basic assumption and have never questioned it. What they need, as we all need is a shock to the system and an infusion of grace which takes their theism out of the comfort zone into the reality zone. This is what we call conversion.'

"Finding Angus: A True Story of Love, War, and Family"

We romantize World War II and forget the desperation and the loss. Angus Zahrt was lost somewhere in the Pacific at the end of the war, and one woman grieved his loss the rest of her life. This is a story about David Dobbs' mother.

"The Return of a Zero Sum World"

I am not as pessimistic as Michael Lind, but I agree with him that the old economy has been dead since 2008, and all the crony capitalists in the world cannot revive it:

'The most probable outcome, when the depth of wealth destruction becomes clear, is likely to be crony capitalism -- the use of political power to provide jobs and income for a much greater number of self-styled "venture capitalists," corporate managers, nonprofit workers, university professors and highly paid public sector managers (not ordinary civil servants like schoolteachers and police officers) than the slowly growing, post-crash economy can actually afford. The right will try to preserve and expand a simulacrum of free enterprise, in the form of defense contractors and privatized welfare state functions. The left wing of the elite will try to create a zombie economy based on taxpayer-subsidized "green industries" that would collapse without tax subsidies and mandates on utility rate-payers. Each party will try to cut the zombie sector of its rival in order to fund its own pet zombies. In the long run, the attempt to prevent an elite economy that is already dead from decomposing, by putting it into suspended animation, is unlikely to succeed, but the project could last a decade or two. Bubble Conservatism and Bubble Progressivism will morph into Zombie Conservatism and Zombie Progressivism.'

"The Possible Conversion of Al Levine"

Pentimento writes another meditation linking art to the personal to the universal to the transcendent.

"From Norway to Hell"

Walther Russell Mead:

'We can be reasonably confident that an increasingly chaotic and stressful 21st century will generate more bitter nutjobs and place more destructive power in their hands. Democracy and affluence won’t cure it; the same forces that raise those golden arches build bombs to knock them down.

'To say all this is not to buy into the case for gloom. Armageddon is no more inevitable in the next century than utopia at least as far as human beings can discern. The extraordinary scientific and technological flowering of the last few hundred years could lead us to either destination, to neither, or to some kind of intermediate zone marked by elements of both. (The last possibility has my vote as the most likely, but nobody can really know.)

'The only conclusion that makes sense to me is that human beings are stuck in a condition of radical uncertainty. Something big and earth shaking is going on around us, but the information we have does not allow us to predict where it all goes.

'In my view, this is one of the reasons that belief in a transcendent power beyond the human mind is intellectually necessary to grapple successfully with the realities of our time. When the determinist progressives threw God under the bus, they threw away the possibility of an integrated world view that has room both for scientific and rational analysis on the one hand and a honest, unsparing appraisal of the radical uncertainty around us on the other.'

What would Lyndon Johnson do?

Lyndon Johnson is discussed quite often on this blog because he was a remarkable man and president. My brother complained last week that the Republicans have prevented President Barack Obama from passing his agenda and that it deserves opportunity to work.

I could not help but turn the question around: Would a Democratic president's agenda die on the vine with 60 votes in the Democratic Senate and a big Democratic majority in the House if Lyndon Johnson were either (a) President or (b) Senate majority leader? Of course not. Johnson would have bought or intimidated dozens of Republicans into supporting the stimulus bill, through tax cuts, pork barrel, or whatever, and thereby been able to arm-twist or persuade Republicans to vote for other Democratic proposals. Who do I blame? (1) Harry Reid, (2) Barack Obama, and (3) Nancy Pelosi. Their job was to win broad enough support to pass the Democratic agenda. By failing to get significant Republican votes while spending $800 billion for the biggest barrel of pork ever, they demonstrated that there would be nothing in it for Republicans to support any later comprehensive reform bills. The Democratic super majority burned most of its seed with the first big bill.

Good leadership, Democratic or Republican, knows that poking the eyes of the opposition will usually backfire sooner rather than later. Good leadership knows that legislative success, especially in comprehensive reform bills, is never certain. If the Democratic leadership visits any oracles or holds any seances, they might want to speak to LBJ. The other Texan in the New Deal pantheon (besides John Nance Garner) is Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House for 17 years, shown above receiving a kiss from the most successful engineer of legislation in the 20th century.

What a downgrade of credit rating means...

A few years ago, a client of mine, a local development authority, received the terrible news that the insurance company which insured its floating-rate bonds had been downgraded by Standard & Poors. The client, which has always serviced its debt promptly and was healthy, saw its interest rates skyrocket until it could restructure its debt through a large letter of credit to replace the insurance policy that was no longer adequate to assure bondholders that they could hold and rely on those bonds. The cost of the restructuring was significant, not unlike that of reissuing the bonds, and it was more than problematical to explain the cost to the elected officials and the taxpayers.

When it comes to government debts, I am a Hamiltonian and not a Jeffersonian. A country which defaults does not recover easily or quickly. Just ask my cousin in Argentina. Here is a piece about how a downgrade could rock the country just as my client was rocked a few years ago.

Is this why I seldom enjoyed math class or paid attention?

Khan Academy is something I have not checked out. Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Not recognizing things...

'But everyone over 50 in America feels a certain cultural longing now. They hear the new culture out of the radio, the TV, the billboard, the movie, the talk show. It is so violent, so sexualized, so politicized, so rough. They miss the old America they were born into, 50 to 70 years ago. And they fear, deep down, that this new culture, the one their children live in, isn't going to make it. Because it is, in essence, an assaultive culture, from the pop music coming out of the rental car radio to the TSA agent with her hands on your kids' buttocks. We are increasingly strangers here, and we fear for the future. There are, by the way, 100 million Americans over 50. A third of the nation. That's a lot of displaced people. They are part of the wrong-track numbers.

'So is this. In the Old America there were a lot of bad parents. There always are, because being a parent is hard, and not everyone has the ability or even the desire. But in the old America you knew it wasn't so bad, because the culture could bring the kids up. Inadequate parents could sort of say, "Go outside and play in the culture," and the culture -- relatively innocent, and boring -- could be more or less trusted to bring the kids up. Popular songs, the messages in movies -- all of it was pretty hopeful, and, to use a corny old word, wholesome. Grown-ups now know you can't send the kids out to play in the culture, because the culture will leave them distorted and disturbed.'

Peggy Noonan

This is a great short essay. It begins by discussing the problems in negotiating the debt ceiling but goes on to things deeper.

"Real Men"

Pentimento reflects on efforts of Catholic men to reinvent masculinity in the 21st century, though often with incomplete or very wounded understandings of masculinity. I am particularly sad for Fr. John Corapi.

Having been a Protestant during the scandals of televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, I am embarrassed that an effective Catholic preacher is in trouble. I do not know whether he violated the disciplines of his priesthood and order, but I am appalled that he refuses to cooperate with his order.

He is a "celebrity" priest. He never discouraged publicity, and he obviously enjoys attention. He is not Saint Bernard, trying without success to return to his Cistercian cell. I learned today that he had established a ministry with little supervision from his missionary order and thus was free to burn himself up. Shame on the order for giving him too long a leash. Shame on him for poking the eyes of his superiors.

Vaccines and Human Tissue

Dr. Joseph Mercola here discusses the use of aborted human issue for the making of vaccines. (My wife likes his writings on health.)

Dr. Helen Ratajczak, a former researcher for a major pharmaceutical company, raised a ruckus when she said that vaccines might be related to the increase in autism and also noted that twenty-three vaccines are made from derivatives of aborted human tissue. CBS News made a report sympathetic to her findings (without much comment about the aborted human tissue) and is getting both praise and criticism.

This blog seldom weighs in on scientific debates, whether it is about global warming or vaccines. Unlike my fellow blogger Pentimento, I know nothing of autism. My knowledge of science is limited to high school chemistry, physics, and biology and my reading of Thomas Kuhn's Structures of Scientific Revolutions in college. I am skeptical of scientific assertions of almost any kind, especially those that come from a paradigm in which scientists in the mainstream are invested in its presumed truth. (They will defend their orthodoxy with the zeal of high priests.) Paradigms, even great ones, usually burst after a few generations, and scientists, on the whole, have a very hard time admitting the extent of their own cultural and professional blinders. But just as war is too important to be left to the generals, science, public health in particular, is too important to be left to the scientists.

Dr. Ratajczak is interviewed here and blasted here and here.

This blog is primarily concerned with morality and the application and practice of Catholic teaching, so I have linked to a website that seeks to persuade our scientific and medical communities not to use aborted human tissue for research or vaccines, Children of God for Life.

Another blogging interruption...

A year ago my wife read this post by Fr. Dwight Longenecker about Camp Kahdalea and Camp Chosatonga in Brevard, North Carolina. Fr. Longenecker goes up there during the summers to serve as chaplain and finds a beautiful catholicity in the directors and staff. Despite our lives being up in the air since Mom's death, my wife and I agreed that we needed to get our daughter to Camp Kahdalea. With prayer and help from family, she is there.

We drove her up last weekend, and as Bobby Sherman once promised in a song, I'm writing her every day. No electronic devices are allowed. The cabins are on stilts. The mountains hem the soccer field to a small size. It's all about nature, fellowship, activities, art, and song.

I am exhausted from my grief, burdens, new job, and travels, though I am blessed every day. I slept twelve hours last night and another two hours this afternoon.

This morning I cried on the way to Mass. As my wife and I recited the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary, I pictured my mother telling me during the 3rd mystery: Convert! Trust in God. Then during the 4th, I could see her as witness to that timeless event, the Transfiguration. During the 5th, I joined her in the Eucharist. Yes, the Eucharist is our unity. It is how I can still touch her.

On Mondays I often go to noon Mass downtown. I pass restaurants as I walk and smell lunch, yet I walk on and usually skip lunch. The Eucharist contains all the love in the world.

I regret I did not write a good Fourth of July post. I enjoy doing so. Here are my Independence Day posts from 2010 and 2008. Veritas et caritas.