Teach me to care and not to care.
In October, I will deliver a lecture entitled “The Classical Christian War on Competence” at the CiRCE Online Conference.
The lecture will center on four subjects: classical writing programs, the Grammy Awards, kidnap-victim Jaycee Lee Dugard, and the following proverb of Nicolás Gómez Dávila: “Modern man is a prisoner who thinks he is free because he refrains from touching the walls of his dungeon.”
It is baffling to me why reasonable men who are well-read in the Scriptures persist in using the axiom, “If all men were angels, no government would be necessary,” to defend their thoughts on politics.
Before the creation of mankind, when there were only angels, government nonetheless existed. There are many orders of angels, some more glorious than others, hence the difference between angels and archangels. What is more, in the original society of angels, one-third proved rebels, and rebellion presupposes the existence of a government.
In brief, Scripture is rather clear that societies of angels do actually exist, that they are not arranged democratically, but hierarchically, and that government should not be viewed as a thing which is necessary, but as a good in itself because God has ordained it.
This is the rather conventional conservative approach to government, though. When Burke defended the English monarchy against the encroachments of French Revolutionary ideas, he did not give any sort of priority to the idea of “limited government.”
The idea that power corrupts and should thus be spread as broadly and thinly across as many people as possible segues rather neatly into communism. The desire to liquidate and redistribute power that was popular in the late 18th century naturally gave way to Marxism just fifty years later.
A more venerable form of conservatism holds that money and power become increasingly meaningless as they become diffuse. One man can do more with a million dollars than a million men can do with a dollar each. The same is true of political power.
I don’t understand why progressives are complaining that the rich have gotten richer during the pandemic. If you give poor people and middle class people five trillion dollars of free money and tell them to spend it immediately, a good portion of that money is going to end up in the pockets of the rich. The rich sell things that the poor and middle class want.
Giving the poor and middle class free money will always mean the rich get richer. You can take money from the rich and give it to the poor, but the poor are always just going to give it back to the rich.
My latest for CiRCE argues that bumping elbows is silly. If we cannot shake hands, we should do the sensible, traditional, meaningful thing and bow to one another.
For everyone who helped give Proverbial a perfect score on Apple after eighty ratings, thank you.
Seen At 8:12AM
a poem by Joshua Gibbs
I ate your plumber
*plums
They were 🔥
lol
“Parent: Given the profound importance of recent events, I wondered what changes you planned on making to your curriculum for the coming year.
Gibbs: That’s a question traditionalists have been asked for over two hundred years now. Ever since the French Revolution, there has been an endless succession of “profoundly important recent events” that are supposed to make people like me give up teaching old books.”
My latest for CiRCE is up now.
At the end of a long lecture on some esoteric philosophical or theological subject, a teacher often wants to tell his students, “Alright, now go live your lives!” When he says this, he means, “Go on a long walk. Go write a poem for a girl. Go get a job. Go quit the job because a better one has come along. Go lay awake in bed and wonder why you’re sinning more this year than last year. Go give ten dollars to a homeless man. Go get caught. Go do all the human things.”
My latest for CiRCE is about why good books demand a full, diverse life.
If man has no soul, giving gifts is nothing more than a slow form of suicide.
Yesterday, I passed a woman slowly driving a minivan with a bumper sticker that read, “Live the life you love.”
She was driving slowly because she was texting.
This was the life she loved.
There are still faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.