A First

I woke up this morning and heard something that I never thought I’d hear on the news: “We need to not rush to judgment. We need to wait until the all the facts are known and not make any hasty conclusions. Making hasty conclusions would be very dangerous.”

You think?

Election Day Thoughts

My thoughts on the election are posted on the CiRCE website, but I am making them available in full here, as well:

Man was created to seek glory. He was created to love the glory of God and to mirror God’s glory through the pursuit of beauty, truth, goodness, and holiness. The glory of man is derived from God and the glory of God is underived. “Only God is good,” teaches Christ, which means the goodness of creation reveals God.

When one human being encounters another human being who is glorious—and this glory comes from beauty, power, strength, talent, skill, wealth, knowledge, or prowess—he will want that glory. He will seek it out. There are only two ways for a man with no glory to seek out the glory of another man:

1. By imitating the glorious man

2. By liquidating that man’s glory and taking it for himself

When modern men encounter great accumulations of glory, they rarely respond by imitation. Rather, their first inclination is to liquidate that great accumulation of glory and redistribute it. Over and over again, modern men liquidate and redistribute, liquidate and redistribute. They do it with power. They do it with money. They do it with truth. 

Imitation is too difficult, takes too long, and is subject to all the inequalities which nature, luck, and inheritance bring.

Modern men are slow to learn that glory cannot be liquidated and redistributed. In liquidating, glory is destroyed. Glory only exists in accumulations. The same is true of power. The same is true of wealth. The glory of a beautiful woman cannot be liquidated and redistributed without mutilating the woman. The most glorious part of a pyramid is the highest stone, and that glory cannot be liquidated and redistributed among every stone without leveling the pyramid.

The man who encounters great glory and attempts to imitate it, though, understands that existence itself is a great ladder which leads to God. When we imitate greater glory, we climb that ladder. The man who imitates great glory is creative, constructive, productive, active. He begins with the impulse to make, not to destroy. He repents. He changes himself as opposed to demanding others change.

The only genuine way to seek glory is by imitation. Everything else is violence. Every act of imitation is an act of becoming.  

Arbitrary Laws

Arbitrary laws have to be enforced with disproportionate punishments. Reasonable laws are based in common sense and exist for everyone’s benefit. Reasonable laws are enforced with proportionate punishments. Why? Because people follow reasonable laws for their own benefit. A man doesn’t drive 100 miles an hour on the interstate for two reasons: first, because he will get a ticket and second, because it is dangerous to drive that fast. The fact it is dangerous means he follows the law for his own good.

Arbitrary laws are attended by disproportionate punishments, though, because no one feels their life is naturally and obviously better by following those laws. The punishment for breaking arbitrary laws must be awesome, baffling, for people have no good reason to keep them otherwise.

Nicolas Gomez Davila

In lectures and articles for CiRCE, I have often mentioned Nicolas Gomez Davila, and lately been asked where to start with his philosophy.

Sadly, very little of Davila’s work has been translated into English. I first encountered Davila on the recommendation of a friend, yet he recommended I begin with Davila’s Goodreads quote page, which is more or less where I have remained for the last year. There is, by my count, just one book in English credited to his name on Amazon, and that book currently sells (used) for nearly a hundred dollars.

It seems the Germans have a huge affection for him. Many of his works are available in German. However, English speaking people seem to have been very slow to catch on to his merits.

New Uncritical Prejudices

There is no “bizarre” Old Testament purity law moden men wouldn’t take seriously if “recent studies” showed it had health benefits. One easily imagines “cloth spun of two fibers” becoming unpopular after headlines reported human skin was healthier (“and 20% more luminous”) when regularly covered with single fiber cloth.

Neither would anyone who decided to switch to single fiber clothes read the studies (or even the short, easily digestible articles which summarized the studies), and yet they would pride themselves on being rational, logical, and scientific in their approach to life.

Madness… Ending?

While generally not one to look for silver linings, the pandemic is putting a pinch on art museums, who have accordingly begun selling off paintings in their permanent collections in order to stay alive.

Every museum selling off art to stay alive has started with their 20th century garbage. I think we are ready to see the bottom fall out of the abstract expressionist market over the next 20 years, which means universities might go back to teaching kids how to be David or Corot as opposed to Damien Hirst.

Michael W. Smith

My latest for CiRCE concerns the place of contemporary Christian music in classical Christian schools. Is it enough that a book, song, or record be “Christian”? Or, do classical Christian schools have a higher standard than “mere Christianity”?

If classical schools have a higher standard than “mere Christianity,” why?

And what is that standard?