Ethics In Fiction

The standards we keep for fictional heroes are kept quite separate from the standards we hold for real people. For example, in The Two Towers, Gandalf refers to Grima as “Wormtongue,” even though “Wormtongue” is an abusive nickname assigned to Grima by all the people in Theoden’s court. While most Christian readers take deep satisfaction in the scene wherein Gandalf finally puts down Wormtongue and delivers Theoden from his evil influence, there’s no escaping the fact that Gandalf has no interest in conciliating words, his confrontation of Grima doesn’t satisfy Matthew 18 standards, and he speaks to Grima in a disrespectful and accusatory manner–because Grima’s actions warrant such treatment.

I’m not sure the modern Christian has a framework for defending Gandalf’s approach to conflict resolution.

Why Things Aren’t Very Good Right Now

Most Christians honestly believe that it is sinfully inappropriate, highly offensive, and worthy of full cancellation for one Christian man to say to another, “Grow a pair,” even if the man hearing these words is weak, cowardly, and his incompetence is bringing many, many other decent men to suffer.

Nonetheless, there has never been an age wherein this piece of advice was more necessary.

Against Servant Leadership

“While I am all in favor of serving others, the expression “servant leadership” is passive-aggressive virtue signaling which coyly suggests there’s something broken in the classic understanding of “leadership” that can be fixed with the help of egalitarian philosophy and LinkedIn business jargon. Imagine asking a fellow in his twenties if he was married and hearing, “I’m a servant husband to my wife.” Are you a father? “I’m a servant father.” What position do you play on the basketball team? “I’m a servant point guard.” Don’t you work at Subway? “I’m a servant sandwich artist.” Well! I’ll just assume you have a gripe against the point guard, the father, and the husband as these concepts have been historically known—though I don’t know that “sandwich artist” is old enough to have a history.

Of course, the term “leadership” isn’t that old either. As Clifford Humphrey noted last year in a brilliant and delightfully bristling piece for The American Mind, “Before the twentieth century, the word leadership almost never appeared in print. Before the 1990s, very few leadership development programs existed. Today… ‘leadership development’ is a $366 billion global industry.” I think it’s a fair rule of thumb that anything which alleges to be a) spiritually important and b) to have gone from 0 to $366b in less than a generation is c) a complete hoax destined to fail soon, but I don’t expect everyone to take a classical perspective on such matters. Humphrey argues that what is now called “leadership” was formerly known as “statesmanship,” but “statesmanship” is inherently rooted in hierarchies and modern people despise hierarchies.

The way Humphrey describes “leadership” in the corporate world and the way Christians describe “servant leadership” are basically interchangeable. Nearly everything else in contemporary Christian culture is modeled after the world, so why not our approach to the workplace? Both “leadership” and “servant leadership” are about community, diversity, equality/our equality in Christ, building others up/the growth of others, and so on. There’s absolutely nothing about “servant leadership” that’s going to intimidate the guy in a Patagonia vest doing a thoroughly secular “leadership development” session for the Whole Foods HQ.”

-from my latest for CiRCE

Releasing Later This Week: Will Heaven Be Boring?

“Will Heaven Be Boring?” is my next pamphlet and will be out later this week through Amazon. It’s a long, meandering conversation between a teacher and student about the titular question which branches out into matters of art, romance, beauty, good taste, piety, knowledge, and freedom. Some of the same matters argued in Love What Lasts are present here, as well, but the pamphlet is meant to be read and discussed in high school classrooms, parent book clubs, and Sunday School classrooms.

In about a month, licensed PDF copies of the pamphlet will be available through Gibbs Classical. Until then, single copies for e-Readers will be available for purchase through Amazon. It should be available in the next three or four days.

So Close, Yet So Far Apart

Progressives think nothing from the past is worth saving, conservatives think almost nothing from the past is worth saving. That little almost is the hinge upon which the political world turns. If anything from the past is worth saving, the entire orientation of man must change.