I generally just comment here to say wow and thank you, but I’ll try to say something very slightly more this time. 😂 Your reference to Wendell Berry in this essay is the first that I’ve noted from you. It makes tremendous sense that you’d be an admirer, but I’m glad to hear it nonetheless. That one living hero would appreciate another is a rare consolation in this life’s long journey.
Anacyclosis is surely endemic to samsara, is it not? The inevitable decline of any and all momentary events of good or functional government—kingship, aristocracy, and democracy, by Polybius’ reckoning in Histories VI—into their shadows, tyranny, oligarchy, and ochlocracy (though a justly cynic observer might well wonder whether there have in fact been genuine instances of the former that are not really the latter), seems to be simply the political reflection of the entropic decline of the kalpas from better to worse. There is no permanent fix to the cycle that I can see contingent to this mutable kosmos, anyway.
"I long for the day, however, when I can return to my posture of airily insouciant disdain for the whole system and can again cast votes only for hopeless third party candidates with a clear conscience. But I suspect I will die before that day comes." You and me, David.
The only way I avoid sinking into despair during this time of late stage capitalism (when both my adult children tell me I will never have grandchildren, for instance) is to focus my attention on my little inclusive Catholic community. We try to operate at a small, local level, supporting each other however we can, doing little corporal works of mercy here and there, sharing meals and contemplative prayers. I read a lot of books about what the supposed "early Christians" did, and try to replicate their activities, but of course I am not willing to sell everything and hold goods in common.
I've lived in the PRC for most of my life, and the key to understanding Xi Jinping (and the rest of China's leadership) is to treat them not as subtle Oriental despots or mad Bolshevik ideologues, but as wealthy, power men of a certain age with all the same prejudices we would expect from that same cohort in the West.
I've been reading You Are Gods, and just read a book review of Soldiers of God about the French Jesuit resistance to both neoscholasticism and nazism. Two-tiered Thomism and fascism seem to make happy bedfellows. And now I read your remarkable and timely comments on the invasion of Ukraine, and the awful comments by the Archdeacon, and it seems analogous to the clerical support of the Spanish, French, Italian, and German fascists. I guess my question or hope would be that this wouldn't be the case in an Eastern Orthodox church, given the lack of a neoscholastic revival in their tradition. But then I suppose I'm asking if the culture makes the theology or the theology makes the culture, and the options aren't quite as simple as that. Anything will be used as a bludgeon by an opportunistic despot, evangelical Christianity, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox theology.
But I suppose a more incarnational view would resist, even violently in the case of the French Resistance, a theology that sacralizes the murder of innocent people and children, or compares that murder to a surgery that will ultimately be life-saving. Or so I would hope.
Just a few meandering thoughts and connections I'm currently trying to clarify in my thinking and writing. Any insights would be appreciated.
“A dictator’s subordinates obey him because of their perception that he has the authority to command them; but he has the authority to command them only because they continue to obey.” As someone born in a country ruled by a dictator, this stood out for me. Excellent article, as usual.
Your views on the political system (on where it does and doesn’t affect the society’s culture) are surprisingly similar to mine.
For the past few years, I’ve come to the realization that social and cultural issues will typically progress (albeit with slow and arduous pacing) while the economic structure of America will be more restrictive and mostly beneficial for the elite class.
After all, corporate powers will always manufacture to the public what the general public wishes to hear (culturally and socially speaking).
OK, "Gehenna waits for you" made me laugh. But when will you join me in entirely eschewing the trappings of capital's sham parliamentary forms? Wendell Berry, oy vey.
One of the “cultural forces” that has an effect on society and its politics is the union movement. In the U. S. without the labor movement the New Deal never would have happened. It was pretty much gutted during the Reagan 80s, with little resistance from the Democrats. But I see the victory of the Amazon workers in Staten Island as a hopeful sign of a reawakening.
David, I been dealing with Russian Trolls/ Putin stooges that try to argue that Ukraine "is a fake nation created by the Soviet Union" and that it has no real history.... Any sources that I can use to counter these idiots?
DBH you are gods has had a special effect on me. Thank you. I’m struggling to understand this passage tho. traditional Aristotelian lan guage concerning the relation between potentiality and actuality seems to me merely to express what I take to be a very basic and logically impeccable modal grammar. Every specific possibility is finite; conversely, infinite possibility can never be specific. And this same elementary logical solvency can be ascribed to the whole Aristotelian language of causality, so long as one does not make the mistake—characteristic of much seventeenth-century science, with its agent and patient substances and forces—of imagining that that language concerns “causes” in the modern sense. Really, a better rendering of “aitiai” or “causae,” in the ancient or mediaeval acceptation, might be “explanations,” “rationales,” “logical descriptions,” or “rational relations.” The fourfold nexus of causality was chiefly a rule of predication, describing the inherent logical structure of anything that exists insofar as it exists, and reflecting a world in which things and events are at once discretely identifiable and yet part of the continuum of the whole. A thing’s aitiai are intrinsic integral logical re- lations, not separated forces in only accidental alliance. A final cause is the inherent natural limit of a particular possibility, not an extrinsically imposed design; it is at once a thing’s intrinsic fullness and its larger par- ticipation in the totality of nature. So a causal relation in this scheme is less like a physical exchange of energy than like a mathematical equation, and the final cause is like the inevitable sum determining that relation. And the logic of finality, if one grants it (as one must), tells us that the only substantial transformations that are not essentially annihilations are modifications already virtually embraced within the natural poten- tials of the thing transformed.
I have always thought of these four causes as ontological and mutually exclusive causal powers? How am I to think of them now?
I generally just comment here to say wow and thank you, but I’ll try to say something very slightly more this time. 😂 Your reference to Wendell Berry in this essay is the first that I’ve noted from you. It makes tremendous sense that you’d be an admirer, but I’m glad to hear it nonetheless. That one living hero would appreciate another is a rare consolation in this life’s long journey.
Anacyclosis is surely endemic to samsara, is it not? The inevitable decline of any and all momentary events of good or functional government—kingship, aristocracy, and democracy, by Polybius’ reckoning in Histories VI—into their shadows, tyranny, oligarchy, and ochlocracy (though a justly cynic observer might well wonder whether there have in fact been genuine instances of the former that are not really the latter), seems to be simply the political reflection of the entropic decline of the kalpas from better to worse. There is no permanent fix to the cycle that I can see contingent to this mutable kosmos, anyway.
"I long for the day, however, when I can return to my posture of airily insouciant disdain for the whole system and can again cast votes only for hopeless third party candidates with a clear conscience. But I suspect I will die before that day comes." You and me, David.
The only way I avoid sinking into despair during this time of late stage capitalism (when both my adult children tell me I will never have grandchildren, for instance) is to focus my attention on my little inclusive Catholic community. We try to operate at a small, local level, supporting each other however we can, doing little corporal works of mercy here and there, sharing meals and contemplative prayers. I read a lot of books about what the supposed "early Christians" did, and try to replicate their activities, but of course I am not willing to sell everything and hold goods in common.
I've lived in the PRC for most of my life, and the key to understanding Xi Jinping (and the rest of China's leadership) is to treat them not as subtle Oriental despots or mad Bolshevik ideologues, but as wealthy, power men of a certain age with all the same prejudices we would expect from that same cohort in the West.
I've been reading You Are Gods, and just read a book review of Soldiers of God about the French Jesuit resistance to both neoscholasticism and nazism. Two-tiered Thomism and fascism seem to make happy bedfellows. And now I read your remarkable and timely comments on the invasion of Ukraine, and the awful comments by the Archdeacon, and it seems analogous to the clerical support of the Spanish, French, Italian, and German fascists. I guess my question or hope would be that this wouldn't be the case in an Eastern Orthodox church, given the lack of a neoscholastic revival in their tradition. But then I suppose I'm asking if the culture makes the theology or the theology makes the culture, and the options aren't quite as simple as that. Anything will be used as a bludgeon by an opportunistic despot, evangelical Christianity, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodox theology.
But I suppose a more incarnational view would resist, even violently in the case of the French Resistance, a theology that sacralizes the murder of innocent people and children, or compares that murder to a surgery that will ultimately be life-saving. Or so I would hope.
Just a few meandering thoughts and connections I'm currently trying to clarify in my thinking and writing. Any insights would be appreciated.
“A dictator’s subordinates obey him because of their perception that he has the authority to command them; but he has the authority to command them only because they continue to obey.” As someone born in a country ruled by a dictator, this stood out for me. Excellent article, as usual.
Your views on the political system (on where it does and doesn’t affect the society’s culture) are surprisingly similar to mine.
For the past few years, I’ve come to the realization that social and cultural issues will typically progress (albeit with slow and arduous pacing) while the economic structure of America will be more restrictive and mostly beneficial for the elite class.
After all, corporate powers will always manufacture to the public what the general public wishes to hear (culturally and socially speaking).
Nice piece!
OK, "Gehenna waits for you" made me laugh. But when will you join me in entirely eschewing the trappings of capital's sham parliamentary forms? Wendell Berry, oy vey.
One of the “cultural forces” that has an effect on society and its politics is the union movement. In the U. S. without the labor movement the New Deal never would have happened. It was pretty much gutted during the Reagan 80s, with little resistance from the Democrats. But I see the victory of the Amazon workers in Staten Island as a hopeful sign of a reawakening.
Anyone with affection for the Orthodox Church should find your comments about kirill completely uncontroversial. Alas…
the cat's out of the bag...this war was never about "creeping NATO" but was always about the eradication and destruction of Ukraine. https://twitter.com/sumlenny/status/1510910740261134338
David, I been dealing with Russian Trolls/ Putin stooges that try to argue that Ukraine "is a fake nation created by the Soviet Union" and that it has no real history.... Any sources that I can use to counter these idiots?
Strange—I did not get an email notification of this post.
DBH you are gods has had a special effect on me. Thank you. I’m struggling to understand this passage tho. traditional Aristotelian lan guage concerning the relation between potentiality and actuality seems to me merely to express what I take to be a very basic and logically impeccable modal grammar. Every specific possibility is finite; conversely, infinite possibility can never be specific. And this same elementary logical solvency can be ascribed to the whole Aristotelian language of causality, so long as one does not make the mistake—characteristic of much seventeenth-century science, with its agent and patient substances and forces—of imagining that that language concerns “causes” in the modern sense. Really, a better rendering of “aitiai” or “causae,” in the ancient or mediaeval acceptation, might be “explanations,” “rationales,” “logical descriptions,” or “rational relations.” The fourfold nexus of causality was chiefly a rule of predication, describing the inherent logical structure of anything that exists insofar as it exists, and reflecting a world in which things and events are at once discretely identifiable and yet part of the continuum of the whole. A thing’s aitiai are intrinsic integral logical re- lations, not separated forces in only accidental alliance. A final cause is the inherent natural limit of a particular possibility, not an extrinsically imposed design; it is at once a thing’s intrinsic fullness and its larger par- ticipation in the totality of nature. So a causal relation in this scheme is less like a physical exchange of energy than like a mathematical equation, and the final cause is like the inevitable sum determining that relation. And the logic of finality, if one grants it (as one must), tells us that the only substantial transformations that are not essentially annihilations are modifications already virtually embraced within the natural poten- tials of the thing transformed.
I have always thought of these four causes as ontological and mutually exclusive causal powers? How am I to think of them now?
Disgusting sick bastard Kirill: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/patriarch-urges-soldiers-defend-peace-loving-russia-amid-ukraine-campaign-2022-04-03/