A Truly Postmodern Turn

If after five years, four hundred million dollars, countless hours spent meticulously recreating costumes, volumes of research, and so forth, it would be really something if midway through episode seven of season four of The Crown, aliens showed up at Buckingham Palace.

On Diet

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates says that guardians must be given a simple diet so they do not think too much about their health. Physical exercise is sufficient care for the body.

But the more fastidious a man is about his diet, the more likely he is to pay “excessive attention to his body,” and there is “no [greater] impediment” to a man being able to carry out his duty than his constant concern for his health.

2400 years ago, Plato understood us.

Needs

Progressives need politics to be fascinating, spectacular, and sublime. Such needs make progressive politics wildly unstable.

Conservatives are content to have stable and boring politics, though, because religion and art serve their desire for the sublime.

Besides, religion is far better than politics at fulfilling the human need for the sublime. “Spectacular politics” ultimately involves nothing more than worshipping perversity and forcing people to do what you want, neither of which is satisfying for all that long.

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.