Walker Percy documentary in the works

The trailer:



Percy's novels and essays drew upon the oddity and despondency of modern life. At a time when every basic need seems met, when man can spy across the globe and amuse himself to death, man can think himself more miserable and solitary than ever.

In this paradox of success, Percy saw proof of man's transcendence. There the novelist found leverage for a Christian, existentialist and uniquely American aesthetic.

Writing books for money: a fool's errand?

Joe Carter discusses the economics of being an author.

Prospects are not good:

950,000 titles out of the 1.2 million tracked by Nielsen Bookscan sold fewer than 99 copies. Another 200,000 sold fewer than 1,000 copies. Only 25,000 sold more than 5,000 copies. The average book in America sells about 500 copies

One author says her net profit on a NY Times bestselling book currently stands at $24,517.36.

Samuel Johnson said nobody but a fool ever wrote except for money.

That was before the internet. There are a lot of fools out there.

Writing may be even less profitable than acting, and dollars for new art are dropping because of competition the Gutenberg Project and YouTube.

Without speaking fees or teaching positions to compensate, does the book writer have a realistic career path?

Seeking Acclaim, They Found Disdain

Philip F. Lawler has posted the first chapter of his book The Faithful Departed, which examines the collapse of Catholic culture in Boston. He writes:

Clearly, any bishop who tolerated abusive priests, covering up the evidence of their crimes, was guided by a very strange, unhealthy understanding of his own pastoral responsibilities. These prelates were, at best, protecting the public reputation of Catholicism. But the engine of the Church runs on God's grace, not on public acclaim; the Church has been most vigorous at times when the faith was held in contempt and even openly persecuted. The Body of Christ does not need a clumsy public-relations campaign. As St. Augustine tersely put it, "God does not need my lie."

The effort to keep ugly secrets from public view would make more sense if the Church saw herself as a purely human institution, depending on public support for her strength. If some isolated scandal arose within a local branch of the Rotary Club we might all agree to keep the matter quiet, to preserve the club's image. Rotarians are good people, after all, and their clubs do a great deal of good work within the communities. If they ever lost their reputation for these good works, the Rotary Clubs would be doomed, because they have no other source of strength.

Lawler connects this solicitous concern for public reputation with the many personal and political compromises made by American Catholics, but especially the Catholic hierarchy. As an analysis based in moral psychology, Lawler's chapter can explain much.

The Democrats are Blue, Because Pro-lifers are Exiled

I thought I already knew what happened to Governor Casey.

The outline is bad enough. The governor who had won his state in 1990 by an astounding 66 percent of the vote was forbidden by his own party leadership from addressing the convention because of his pro-life views.

The rebuke is infamous among Catholics. Bill Galston noticed as much while discussing religion and the Democratic Party: "I cannot manage to find a Catholic intellectual who will not in conversation refer to what happened to Bob Casey at the 1992 Democratic convention."

But the details of the Casey insult are agonizing to read.

Casey described the rejection letter the DNC sent in response to his request for floor time as "the kind of letter they might have sent Lyndon LaRouche, had he asked to address the convention." One of the guests on the convention platform was Kathy Taylor, a Republican pro-choice activist who had campaigned for Casey's opponent in the gubernatorial race.

The governor described his place at the convention:

And so from my seat in the outer reaches of the Garden, I watched a pro-choice Republican supporter of my pro-choice Republican opponent, whom I had defeated by a million votes to be re-elected as Democratic governor, proudly proclaiming her allegiance to the pro-choice forces.

In his latest book Mark Stricherz provides the exemplar of Casey's humiliation. "On the convention floor was Karen Ritter, a state Democratic legislator, selling large buttons with pictures of Casey dressed up as the Pope."

How did the Democrats, who were once denounced for being the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion," reach a point where an activist on the convention floor could confidently, if unconsciously, echo the propaganda of the Know-nothings and the Klan?

Stricherz answers the question well in his book Why the Democrats are Blue: Secular Liberalism and the Decline of the People's Party.

In Stricherz's telling, the old party bosses who dominated the party from the New Deal through the 1960s selected candidates with an eye towards practical success. A winning candidate on the national level could bring home the bacon for the bosses' working class constituents. Ideological concerns were minimal. Though the corruption of Daley and Curley is legendary, bosses could act quite justly. Pittsburgh's David Lawrence, for instance, helped push through civil rights reforms.

These bosses were overwhelmingly Catholic and patrons of blue-collar workers.

Though often democratic in outcome, the boss system was undemocratic in process. Realizing the need to create a more responsive party leadership, the ethnic bosses and other party leaders agreed to reform the party delegate system. In 1968.

That was a bad time to rewrite the rules for selecting delegates. Young anti-war activists, fearing for their lives, made sure their partisans were on the selection committee.

Enter the McGovern Commission. Though only racial discrimination was a problem in Democratic caucuses, the commission instituted quotas based on race, youth, and sex.(This explains the Democrats' continuing affinity for quotas)

Young female delegates were, with good reason, presumed to be more anti-war. The feminists, whose loyalty then could have swayed to the Republicans, were well-organized enough to exploit the quotas and install their delegates. (Stricherz explains the specifics here)

The only other demographic that was poised to benefit from the change was the secular college-educated liberal. Their numbers and goals significantly overlapped with the feminists. Their opponents easily tarred them as partisans of Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion. As their shared cultural liberalism became more prominent, the loyalty of more conventional Democratic voters waned.

One passage particularly shows the transition:

The differences between the leaders of the McGovern Commission and those in charge of the Chicago convention were stark. In 1968, the chairman o fthe DNC(John Bailey), the chairman of the Platform Committee(Rep. Hale Boggs), the chairman of the Credentials Committee(Gov Richard Hughes of New Jersey) and the kingmaker at the convention(Mayor Daley of Chicago) were all Roman Catholic; were professional politicians; were based either in the big cities or in state houses; and had a cross-racial, Catholic, and working-class constituency. In 1969, the chairman of the commission(McGovern), the general counsel to the commission(Segal), the chief of communication consultants(Wexler), the director of research(Bode), and the most active commissioner(Dutton) were all either mainline Protestants or non-Orthodox Jews; were predominantly activists or political aides; were based in the universities; and had a largely suburban, upper-class, white constiutency. The leadership of the party was about to change. ( p. 92)

What Catholics remained in the party leadership had sworn servility to the pro-choice party line, and contemporary rising stars must follow their lead. Even the token pro-lifers Bob Casey, Jr. and Colorado Governor Bill Ritter, have been easily domesticated and compromised by the Democratic establishment, who are even more cynical in their token appeals to social conservatism than the Republicans are. If one is willing to be compromised, staying Democrat still looks good to many Catholics. Such candidates even pick up the votes of nice old little ladies who think that because they go to Mass, they must be a pro-life Democrat.

Why the Democrats are Blue can teach one a lot about politics. The tale of the McGovern Commission is a perfect example of how the pragmatic, broad aims of an establishment prove vulnerable to the concerted efforts of a well-organized ideological faction. As Stricherz says,

...socially conservative Democrats had failed to mount an effective effort. Nellie Gray, a delegate for pro-life Democratic presidential candidate Eileen McCormack, suggested that her side suffered from a dearth of lobbyists: “In those days, all of us in the pro-life movement were active in three or four things at the same time.”

Further, Stricherz's study finally explains why blue-collar concerns have taken a back-seat along with the Catholics: the unions themselves were the Catholic vote, and the marginalization of Catholics was, in effect, the marginalizing of labor leaders.

Stricherz suggests that since the Democrats have lost their elections since shunning the Catholics from leadership, simply reversing that trend would help the Democrats win elections and restore pro-life concerns to the party.

Maddeningly, he never expands this argument in necessary detail. Stricherz, I think, needs to attack the specific claims of Fred Dutton, who worked on a 1968 Democrat commission examining the party structure. Dutton justified changes in the system by claiming the old demographics were shifting. He wrote:

But the traditional blue-collar base, while still very substantial politically, is disappearing over the long run by losing most of its children to a different political and social group with rising educational levels, affluence, and the greater cultural sophistication taking hold.(p. 124)

To a significant extent this evaluation seems to have borne out. Irish-Americans are now among one of the wealthiest ethnic groups in the country. Many Catholics now mouth anti-union sentiment that would have mortified their grandfathers. The collapse and sabotage of Catholic education has reduced Catholic identity and practice and has left even mass-going Catholics more indifferent to moral standards and their application to politics.

Further, it's not clear that the party's rejection of the pro-life Catholic vote has as much impact on the presidential race as Stricherz suggests. As one can tell even from the map that adorns the book's cover, most of the significantly Catholic states are still reliably Democrat. Only Ohio and perhaps Florida are, I believe, key states where the Catholic vote can swing elections.

It seems more clear that the loss of the South to the Republicans has doomed Democratic presidential campaigns. Southern governors Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton have been the only Democratic candidates to have won the presidency in the post-McGovern era.

Stricherz offers several proposals for reforming the Democrats away from their pro-choice absolutism and, by implication, towards decades of dominance in presidential elections. He proposes abolishing the state party caucuses, allowing independents to vote in primaries, eliminating delegate quotas and party-appointed "super-delegates," and moving the first primary elections to the swing states.

I think the last idea is brilliant. But I think the Democrats are too committed to quotas in other areas to remove them from their own system, especially if the present leadership has benefited from such quotas.

However, I worry about Stricherz's arguments for the abolition of the state party caucus. Stricherz says that

The main problem with caucus elections is the amount of time and effort they require of voters. Those who attend caucuses have to do more than show up and vote; they have to spend at least an hour and often several hours sitting through a meeting before declaring themselves for a candidate.

Oh, the agony of political participation! Hours of boredom, once every two years!

I admit being under the influence of John Wren, a tireless advocate of the caucus system. To abolish the caucuses would be to abolish one of the last remnants of localist neighborhood politics.

Another of Stricherz's arguments against the caucus system is that caucus meetings are disproportionately attended by activists. But if the caucuses favor organized partisans, why can't one better organize one's own partisans instead of directing energy into changing the whole system?

Stricherz's other objections are that caucuses are held only at night, are sparsely-attended by working-class voters, and lack elections by secret ballot. Again, these seem to be problems best addressed by methods other than abolition.

These several criticisms are offered only because I think the book is quite good. Why the Democrats are Blue effectively describes how Catholics used to be a power in Democratic leadership. The book captures the limbo of the Catholic who is now exiled from the Democratic party. Stricherz tells a well-researched story of how structural party changes made by seemingly minor figures can hijack a party.

Now to hijack it back.

Historical Fiction, with Space Aliens

After reading the reviews at Curt Jester and Darwin Catholic, I picked up a copy of Michael Flynn's novel Eifelheim. It's the first science fiction I've read in years, and better than I expected.

The premise is simple: space aliens make first contact with Earth after shipwrecking near a remote German village. In the fourteenth century.

Flynn depicts with talent the political, religious, and intellectual ferment of the times. The main character is an intellectual parish priest named Father Dietrich. He is in hiding, having been a member of the fraticelli, the radical and violent Franciscan sect that strived for the abolition of property. Educated at the University of Paris, he is well-attuned to the philosophical thought that became foundational for the natural sciences.

Enter the extraterrestrials.

The Krenken are an insect-like race the German villagers compare to grasshoppers. Shipwrecked after some unrevealed technical malfunction in their ship, their appearance provokes fears they are demonic visitors. Father Dietrich, though as confused as anyone else, uses a bit of scholastic logic to deduce they are in fact natural creatures comparable to the dog-headed men and headless anthropoids reputed to live in the antipodes. In a wry inversion of sci-fi standbys, the limitations of medieval knowledge of the world provide grounds for acceptance instead of mob violence. It recalls the irony of Miller's A Canticle for Liebowitz, in which monks become the only custodians of scientific knowledge after a nuclear catastrophe incites anti-intellectual obscurantism.

Michael Flynn shows an immense capacity for intellectual sympathy through his priest character's attempts to fit advanced scientific knowledge into the categories familiar to him. Flynn makes the medieval mind come alive, while suggesting the strangeness of our own times. The aliens strain to make their knowledge intelligible as Father Dietrich suggests Latinate or Greek neologisms to describe concepts well-familiar to the modern reader. Scientific concepts we take for granted, like protein, bacteria, and gravity, take on a marvelous appearance when seen through the eyes of an intelligent man living in a less advanced age. The priest's arguments with the aliens are amusing in their defense of fourteenth-century cosmology, but too honest and sophisticated to disdain.

While considerably hindered in scientific argument, Father Dietrich actually wins some of the religious disputes. His Christian faith, though explained through a poorly translating computer, gains a few adherents among the stranded aliens. The society of the Krenken is never elucidated, but it seems to be a hierarchical culture based on violent strength and a brutally Darwinian survival of the fittest. The lowest-ranked Krenken find Christian love and self-sacrifice convincing. Despite its alienness, Christianity provides them a welcome relief from their overbearing superiors.

Of course Michael Flynn must take poetic liberties with history. For the most part, they work to the good. However, he makes a few stumbles. At one point he references the ad orientem orientation of the Christian liturgy as a new phenomenon replacing the versus populum, which certainly doesn't correspond to what liturgical history I know. Further, he presents William of Ockham as a proponent of a proto-Lockean revolutionary natural rights theory that I don't think came into its own until the sixteenth century. Though some anachronisms are necessary to such a work, these two instances in particular bothered me.

Flynn's work is in many ways a defense of the medieval against contemporary caricatures. Most of the time this defense is well-done and subtle. I think it superior to Umberto Eco's In the Name of the Rose, which rested on the comical premise that a monk would hate laughter and comedy.

However, one crude apologetic for the Inquisition struck me as crude and not particularly relevant to its context.(It took place in one of the "present day" scenes that occasionally interrupts the historical fiction. In these scenes an historian seeks the reason Eifelheim remained abandoned through the centuries. As other reviewers note, these scenes don't gel well with the rest of the work.)

I have previously noted Michael Flynn's depiction of the excitement of scientific discovery in his fictionalized account of medieval science. If Eifelheim's imaginative sympathy and historical awareness are now typical of science fiction, I will have to look twice at the genre novels I happen upon.

The Fires of Savonarola's Florence

The ferocious energy of the Renaissance republic and its most famous preacher is expertly captured in Lauro Martines' Fire in the City. With patient understanding of his subject Martines describes to a modern audience the triumphs and travails of the Dominican monk Savonarola and the political energies which he channeled--energies which, in the end, destroyed him.

In Martines' sympathetic telling, Savonarola was a fierce patriot who in 1495 helped expel the Medici from power and strengthen the new republic formed in their wake. Though a lover of liberty, he nonetheless preached clemency for the allies of the exiled rulers when tyrant-hating vengeance waxed. He also countered oligarchic tendencies among the city's elite in favor of wider citizen participation. In foreign policy he embraced the invasion of the French King Charles VIII as the scourge of Florence's enemies and Italy's flaccid believers. He even did all this without holding formal political office.

Yet first in his priorities was church reform, universal in scope but with Florence at its center. Reform was much needed, to say the least. The Great Schism had weakened religious authority. The papacy was held by the simonious decadent Alexander VI. Bishoprics were collected like so many choice financial properties and ruled in absentia, badly.

Against this established venality the righteous Savonarola spoke. Two lines from his sermons display his driven power: "I want men to be illuminated by truth. I want to fight the whole world and win."

He had no tolerance for corrupt clerics. His early polemical poems were written long before his days in Florence. Titled De Ruina Mundi and De Ruina Ecclesiae, they will appeal to those tired of laxity in the Catholic scene who will find in Savonarola the under-represented rigorist flavor of anti-clericalism. He could be writing of present-day episcopal malfeasance when he declares:

Ah, look at that catamite and at the pimp,
Dressed in purple, frauds looked up to
By the common people and adored by the blind world.

Later he advises:

Avoid all those who put on purple.
Flee from palaces and ostentatious loggias,
Speaking to the few alone,
For you will be the enemy of all the world.

What enjoyment one finds in these passages should be tempered by the observation of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn: "After two hundred years of cheerful and ironic anti-clericalism the Reformation came after all, and destroyed the fabric of the Church in a number of nations."

Despite all this youthful talk of contra mundum, the monk avoided exclusive elitism in his Florentine ministry. At points, his thirst for justice and freedom and his significantly genuine patriotic piety captivated a vast portion of the city. His charisma shines through his recorded sermons. In one oft-used rhetorical device he converses with a fictional interlocutor:

-Oh, friar.... they say you are a heretic.
-Throw any low insult at me, but don't call me a heretic.
-They say you're crazy.
-Oh, now there you've said something beautiful. [As sinners] we're all a bit mad.
-Ah, but you've said the Church is a whore. O father, the Holy Church? What have you said?
-You're a fool ... go and do some more studying.

The pre-lenten Florentine carnival traditionally involved deadly rock fights among youths and debauchery among their elders. The monk's famous bonfires of the vanities attempted to subvert and redirect these energies towards spiritual renewal. Savonarola, believing their elders to be incorrigible, would send out groups of teenage boys and young men to collect "vanities" from the people. These collections, with few exceptions, were entirely voluntary. The collected dirty books, games, and luxurious clothes were then set ablaze in a vivid symbol of Lenten sacrifice.(This suggests a cheerful and productive activity for modern-day parish youth groups.)

Savonarola's popularity was not total. His efforts at moral reform provoked a backlash from among its targets. Street gamblers started accosting and threatening the zealous youths who had once driven them indoors. The wealthy hated the Savonarolan fashion police who would publicly deride and humiliate luxurious dressers. But his political and ecclesiastical opponents were the most potent of the friar's adversaries.

In June of 1497 his enemies finally secured an excommunication from the papacy. For months they had reported trumped up charges of heresy and misconduct, but they also merely repeated the man's heated attacks on papal corruption. Earlier the pope had wished Savonarola to defend his positions in person. Though a worldly man, Alexander VI seemed to fear the monk really was the prophet he claimed to be. Savonarola, who needed the protection of an armed guard in his home city, feared assassination if he were to leave his home turf. In an effort to reign in the recalcitrant frair, his monastery at San Marco was ordered to submit itself to the authority of another, more diplomatic, Dominican congregation.
This order was simply ignored, and it was only a matter of time before the papacy bowed to the anti-Savonarolan factions.

Yet even the excommunication did not end Savonarola. He denied the legitimacy of the punishment on the grounds it was based on fraudulent accusations. He began preaching again with even more anti-papal vehemence.

But his position weakened. Florence feared worsening tensions with the papacy and other Italian powers and severe domestic factionalism strained political comity. Savonarola was challenged by a Franciscan opponent to undergo a trial by fire in a city square. Though one of Savonarola's disciples had accepted the challenge and a great crowd gathered and prepared the site for the event, the great test of fire never took place. This abortive trial in some minds confirmed Savonarola as a false prophet. An angry mob beseiged San Marco, captured the monk, and turned him over to hostile elements in the city government. Accused of fraud and heresy, he was tortured. Savonarola, very intolerant of pain, soon accused himself of being a megalomaniacal fraud. He abjured all his extraordinary efforts as exercises in vanity. He and two fellow monks were hanged in May of 1498, and what vanities of their bodies remained were themselves immolated by fire.

See also: Daniel Larison's review

The Varieties of Corporate Welfare, Exposed

Big Business is one of the obvious features of modern life. Its left-wing opponents regard corporate America as rogues relentlessly maximizing profit and bristling at every government regulation, intent on returning American law to the age of unregulated robber barons. Its right-wing defenders valorize the corporation for its economic productivity and seemingly tireless pursuit of consumer satisfaction through innovation and sound business sense--all without the inefficiency and stultification of government intervention.

Tim Carney's The Big Ripoff attacks many of these superficial themes, but also reveals how such rhetoric does not go far enough in its criticism or its praise. Subtitled How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money, his book reveals the curious alliance of business and government interests as two symbiotic parasites leeching upon taxpayers, consumers, and smaller entrepreneurs.

Regulation too often is written by the largest actors in the very industries targeted for legal constraints. Regulation means higher costs of entry for would-be competitors and more overhead for already-existing but less powerful competition. Regulation efforts ensure closer cooperation between the most influential businesses and the public sector. Such efforts serve the expansive tendencies of government bureaucracies and provide politicians the resume-building opportunity of Standing Up to Big Business. The businesses supporting state regulation also gain a reputation for being responsible corporate citizens, while their more radical political opposition find attempts at more restrictive legislation forestalled.

Carney reports that tax increases are also often supported by business organizations. Tax hikes often provide funds for direct or indirect corporate subsidies. The potential variety of this indirect support is unnerving: infrastructure improvements, worker education programs, and mass transportation, even when serving public purposes also reduce some business expenses. Even redistributionary schemes could find support in some sectors: Walmart, the corporate bugbear par excellence, would benefit from the welfare-induced increased spending power of its lower-class clientele, and such logic was at work in its political support for a minimum wage hike.

The story of the American sugar industry is perhaps the most grievous example of corporate welfare recounted in The Big Ripoff. US Sugar and the Fanjul family both dominate the American sugar supply. They have secured not only a highly protective quota against foreign importers, but also exemptions from said quota for their corporate-owned sugarfields in the Dominican Republic. They are major beneficiaries of the damaging swamp-draining infrastructure of the Everglades, governmental loans, and guaranteed sales at twice the international rate. Worse, the artificially high price of sugar has established corn syrup as the leading ingredient in many American foods, thus allying corn-growers with an industry that would otherwise be its competition.

The Florida-based Fanjuls carefully guard their privileges through bipartisan support for key politicians in their crucial swing state, and they get their money's worth: Carney estimates the sugar complex needlessly costs taxpayers and consumers $1.9 billion per year.

Other anecdotes explore the revolting abuses of eminent domain, the incoherence of programs which join foreign policy with business expansion, and the sad, wearisome ways in which legislation merely allies itself with cartelization and oligopoly.

At times the thought of this incestuous network of collaborating interests induces hopelessness. How can one repeal even one subsidy benefitting a powerful, energetic few but of only minimal consequence to most voters?. How can one start a business if one faces a mountain of regulations cooked up by one's largest competitors?

At other points, Carney's efforts encourage that shadow of despair: cynicism. While any piece of legislation has self-interested parties for and against, the capacity for disinterested deliberation can be corrupted by constant analysis of ulterior motives as much as by monied interests. Though Carney is careful to qualify his polemic, his work needs the complement of a wise understanding of sound public policy.

That said, The Big Ripoff is a certain cure for the naivety found among both reformers and free marketeers.

See Also: An earlier selection from Carney

The Dissatisfied Sadness of Rasselas

"He had been before terrified at the length of life which nature promised him, because he considered that in a long time much must be endured; he now rejoiced in his youth, because in many years much might be done."
-Samuel Johnson, Rasselas

Few works are so affecting as Johnson's study of human limitation and discontent therewith. His protagonist described here has not been worn down by poverty or illness, but rather luxury: Rasselas is an Ethiopian prince confined to a Happy Valley where all his desires are apparently met. Yet man gets unused to anything, and so the prince abandons his regimented life of ease to explore the real world, that he might find true happiness.

Rasselas meets philosophers, robbers, an eighteenth-century mad scientist, and men wealthy and poor yet no way of life relieves his sense of unfulfillment. He must content himself with the limits of life, dissatisfying and otherwise. Johnson plays with one of the basic paradoxes of life: limited goals are the only attainable goals, yet human improvement rests on our often boundless resentment of limitations.

That Johnsonian wit which powered Boswell's biography is present throughout. Regarding the the perils of moralism Rasselas' guide cautions "Be not too hasty to trust, or to admire, the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men." One such moralist, after enchanting a crowd with his praises of the philosophical life, soon finds himself disconsolate after the death of his daughter:

"Sir, said the prince, mortality is an event by which a wise man can never be surprised: we know that death is always near, and it should therefore always be expected."
"Young man, answered the philosopher, you speak like one that has never felt the pangs of separation."
"Have you then forgot the precepts, said Rasselas, which you so powerfully enforced? Has wisdom no strength to arm the heart against calamity? Consider, that external things are naturally variable, but truth and reason are always the same."
"What comfort, said the mourner, can truth and reason afford me? of what effect are they now, but to tell me that my daughter will not be restored?"

Vanity and pride aspire to eradicate sadness and explain away death, but find their efforts thwarted in the end. The thematic parallels with Ecclesiastes are obvious.

Johnson rightly concludes his tale inconclusively. The optimism of the young Rasselas is tempered by experience, though the prince still itches for greatness. His anxieties about choosing the proper path fade after examining the catacombs of Cairo. His philosophical interlude itself appears vain in the face of mortality, and he makes an uneasy peace with the dissatisfied life. The futile quest for worldly happiness is resolved only in the hope of eternal happiness with God. And fallen creatures that we are, that great hope still does not satisfy.

See also: Theorodre Dalrymple favorably compares Rasselas to Voltaire's Candide.

Walker Percy on YouTube

Doc Percy speaks upon receiving the Laetare Medal at Notre Dame. via Amy Welborn

Atheist Praise For Chastity

Udolpho reviews Dawn Eden's The Thrill of the Chaste, pruning away the verbiage of self-righteous libertines:

How little we know our sexual selves, and how much less we know with each passing day as we are enjoined to accept ever more bizarre permutations of sexual love (or "love") as perfectly normal, perfectly healthy. There is somewhere in our fascination with all these permutations, most of which are useless except as fillips to a jaded appetite, evidence that we have completely lost sense of the place that sex has in a healthy life.

(the post contains a few obscenities)

Douthat on the Horror Novel

Indeed, insofar as King has a theology, it involves an Almighty who wills not only sacrifice but also suffering and death to serve a larger purpose that's beyond any mortal ken. Such a God is awesome and cruel all at once, with no interest in answering to his creatures-even if many of King's characters react with appropriately Joban outrage to his demands. "He can't take them all and leave me!" wails David Carver, the preteen prophet from Desperation, when it becomes clear that his whole family will die at the demon's hands while he is required to live. "Killer God," a woman screams in The Stand, when Mother Abagail delivers God’s demand that her husband go out into the desert unarmed to confront their adversary. "Killer God! . . . Millions-maybe billions-dead in the plague. Millions more afterward . . . Isn’t he done yet? Does it just have to go on and on until the earth belongs to the roaches? He's no God. He's a daemon, and you're His witch."

[...]

Nor is King's God disposed to handle every supernatural flare-up. He coexists with a multitude of lesser powers, and he allows most of them more or less free rein. Not only ghosts and demons are loose in King’s post-secular landscape but also a Who’s Who of stranger spiritual influences, some benign and some malignant, some distinctively American and some very much Old World. In Rose Madder, there’s Circe and the Minotaur; in Insomnia, the three Fates, spinning, measuring, and cleaving away; in Pet Sematary, the Native American Wendigo. And then there is the host of quasi-mythic beings that King himself invents, from the dizzying cast of his Dark Tower saga to the unearthly Long Boy, which haunts the visions of a writer and his wife in last year's Lisey’s Story, fixing them with "the hideous pressure of its insane regard." Writing in Books and Culture several years ago, Susan Wise Bauer complained that the willingness of King's God to tolerate these lesser rivals-and his insistence that his human surrogates take them on-made him "an undemanding fellow" who outsources the hard work to human beings "and then desperately hopes they can pull it off." King’s Almighty, she suggested, "is much like Rabbi Kushner’s God-creative, good, well-meaning, but limited."

But, if anything, the opposite is true. King's God isn't a well-meaning weakling, holding our hands and hoping things turn out OK; rather, he's so far above the various adversaries, from Tak to Randall Flagg, that the possibility of their winning passing victories concerns him not at all. The demons are a means to chastise and test a struggling humanity, not a threat to God himself; they are the potter's wheel on which King's characters can be broken without placing God's providence in doubt.

This is questionable theology, but it is genius as a literary move and a perfect solution to the problem that God's omnipotence poses for dramatic tension in a supernatural novel.

Ross Douthat, Stephen King's American Apocalypse

One of the better pop-culture analyses I've read.

Ron Hansen Ordained a Deacon

News to me:

Ron Hansen has built up an impressive resume: award-winning author, literary editor, professor.

But Hansen's latest undertaking isn't a typical literary affair -- Hansen has become a deacon in the Catholic Church. He was ordained as a permanent deacon Saturday at the Mission Church in front of over 200 of his friends and family.

Anthony Daniels Slights the Hagiographers' St. George Orwell

Great writer as Orwell was, he is not beyond criticism—as I am sure he would have been the first to agree. He never encouraged anyone to turn him into a plaster saint, though his very abjuration of claims to sanctity is, paradoxically, one of the grounds for his canonization; this modesty should not obscure from us the fact that he was full of contradictions, his powers of analysis were very deficient, he often lacked the imagination to see the consequences of what he said, he accepted political clichés uncritically, notwithstanding his brilliant essay on that very subject, and though he made much of what he saw as the quintessentially English quality of decency (I don’t think anyone would make that mistake nowadays after half an hour in any English town or city), which he contrasted with the cruelty promoted by ideology, he was not himself entirely immune from the latter, at least in the abstract.
Anthony Daniels, Orwell's "Catalonia" revisited

Daniels goes on to note Orwell's weaknesses--his service to socialist cant and his cavalier attitude towards the crimes of Barcelonan anarchists.

In my teens I enjoyed the only two Orwell books everybody reads. Yet his dystopia and his political fable have certainly produced a few uncritical young admirers who go on to read the rest of his works and accept Orwell's flimsy radical advocacy. I wonder how long the average American high school curriculum will sustain Orwell's ambivalent position as an anti-Soviet moralist.

Decentralist Links of Note

Small is Still Beautiful, a blog being written in concert with the release of Joseph Pearce's book on the life and thought of E.F. Schumacher.

The Vincent McNabb Society, dedicated to the Dominican who so inspired Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton in their interpretations of Catholic social thought.

Here is McNabb defending agrarianism:

The third (psychological) principle is that from the average man we cannot expect more than average virtue. A set of circumstances demanding from the average man more than average (i.e. heroic) virtue is called an Occasion of Sin.

The fourth (moral) principle is that the occasions of sin should be changed, if they can possibly be changed, i.e. they must be overcome by flight not fight.

The great observed fact, of world-wide incidence, is that in large industrialized urban areas (and in town-infested rural areas) normal family life is psychologically and economically impossible; because from the average parent is habitually demanded more than average virtue...
..From this observed fact that the industrialized town is an occasion of sin we conclude that, as occasions of sin must be fled,... Flight from the Land must be now be countered by Flight to the Land."

Hamlet's Self-Doubt Triggered By Dubious Ghost

"Hamlet's quandary is chiefly based on the problem of discernment of spirits." So writes Thomas A. at The Ark and the Dove. He quotes a Kittredge commentary on the tragedy:

Hamlet believes that the apparition is indeed the ghost of his father and that it has told the truth. Yet it may be a demon in his father's shape, tempting him to kill an innocent man. This doubt as to the ambiguous apparition accords with ancient doctrine and was perfectly intelligible to any Elizabethan audience. Disregard of Hamlet's dilemma has led to misinterpretation of his character...

Nature and Creation: Conceptually Distinct?

Lee at Verbum Ipsum reviews David B. Hart's The Doors of the Sea:

That view, he argues, is that "nature" as we know it is not to be identified with "creation." The God of Christianity is a God of perfect self-giving love, and creation reflects its creator in being peaceful, harmonious, and beautiful. "Nature," by contrast

is everywhere attended -- and indeed preserved -- by death. All life feeds on life, each creature must yield its place in time to another, and at the heart of nature is a perpetual struggle to survive and increase at the expense of other beings. It is as if the entire cosmos were somehow predatory, a single great organism nourishing itself upon the death of everything to which it gives birth, creating and devouring all things with a terrible and impressive majesty. Nature squanders us with such magnificent prodigality that it is hard not to think that something enduringly hideous and abysmal must abide in the depths of life.

Not without foundation, it seems, Lee suspects a hint of gnosticism. I really need to get this book.

Theodore Dalrymple weighs Voltaire's Candide against Johnson's Rasselas

The Ivy Life: Ross Douthat's Privilege

I never took the time to plug Ross Douthat's Privilege, an excellent memoir of his Harvard years. His glimpses into the world of the overclass are enlightening, and a bit disillusioning. Harvard, it seems, is hardly an academic juggernaut as far as its undergraduates are concerned. I was perversely pleased that Douthat and I share the same complaints of a superficial, unsystematic educational regimen, only I was fortunate enough to receive my education at perhaps a tenth of the cost at the University of Colorado.

But who besides aspiring intellectuals goes to college for an education? Douthat's depiction of Ivy League social life is the real meat of the story. His visits to posh parties at the Harvard clubs, those supreme social networks, reveal both Douthat's reverse snobbery and his outsider's anxious craving to enter the inner sanctum as if one who belongs there. In his accounts of such events he is self-consciously nolens volens, covetous of high privilege while feeling he should really be disdaining the shows of the elite.

Douthat does not gain a club membership(which seems to have done no harm to his journalism career--he now writes for The Atlantic Monthly), but the rigors of high society are evident throughout the book. The mix of competitive upper-middle-class meritocrats and spendthrift scions can be poisonous. One rising college star, a young woman from flyover country, manages to compete with the old money on campus only by embezzling one hundred thousand dollars from a university theater troupe to fund her lavish parties.

Yet that campus socialite's fall is in Douthat's view symptomatic of far deeper problems at Harvard. While the old elite at least recognized their place at society's peak was somewhat accidental, the meritocracy has no such humility. Meritocratic culture encourages a sense of ruthless entitlement since it "indoctrinates its students in a religion of success, and seduces them, oh so subtly, with the promise that what they have is theirs by right of talent." And elsewhere: "The modern elite's rule is regarded not as arbitrary but as just and right and true, at least if one follows the logic of meritocracy to its unspoken conclusion." Though this ethos is subconscious, it is reinforced by the lack of acknowledgment that their careful grooming begins even in infancy with the privileges of wealth: selective schooling, private tutoring, and family networks.

The mores of this elite are libertine, but its members are too careerist to let such a lifestyle ultimately interfere with their personal advancement. Though the scare tactics of sex ed are less effective on the less well-to-do, for the overachievers of the Ivy League the prospect of a ruined future among the powerful is fearsome indeed. Douthat writes: "we don't get pregnant young or married too early, we don't get STDs, we don't have abortions--though we find it comforting to know that we always could, if it came to that." The consequences of such licentiousness among the less fortunate are known to the privileged only in the increased opportunities for charitable(and resume-padding) service work among the shattered families of America.

The educational system only reinforces this collapse of values. Even when truth is a criterion, "the only absolute truth that the upper class accepts these days is the truth of the market." Postmodern fads in Harvard's history and English departments have crippled the response of anti-capitalist progressives, and this is not entirely a good thing. The professoriate's patina of skeptical philosophy can only extend so far among the wealthy, and, as Douthat says, this outlook "amounts to a tacit acceptance of capitalism's ruthless insistence that only science is important, only science really pursues truth, because only science has tangible, quantifiable, potentially profitable results."

But Ross Douthat's book is not entirely glum. The active and inquisitive student can actually find a decent education at Harvard. So, too, can he even find professors who don't contemn undergraduates as a hindrance to their research. There's even some outright comedy: Douthat relates an anecdote about skinny-dipping with the aged William F. Buckley, Jr., and afterwards talking politics, whiskey, and cigars aboard his yacht.

The very mention of Buckley, the conservative movement's last patriarch, prompts comparisons to Buckley's debut book God and Man at Yale. Buckley was eccentric enough to believe that his 1950s Yale was sidelining Christianity, patriotism, and sound education in favor of agnostic, anti-American scholastic trifles. Buckley's focus on the now-faded Christian sympathies of the American academy deserves a follow-up.

Though Douthat, a Catholic like Buckley, mentions both God and Man at Yale and Harvard's religious atmosphere, or lack thereof, his treatment of religion as such is too cursory. Considering the graduates of his alma mater adflicta are now dealing with the highly religious problem of militant Islam, perhaps a second book is in order.

The Evolution of Natural Law

Amy Welborn notes that The New York Times reports that Marc D. Hauser, previously mentioned here for his research on ethics and neuroscience, has just released his new book Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong.

The moral grammar too, in Dr. Hauser's view, is a system for generating moral behavior and not a list of specific rules. It constrains human behavior so tightly that many rules are in fact the same or very similar in every society ? do as you would be done by; care for children and the weak; don?t kill; avoid adultery and incest; don?t cheat, steal or lie.

Like Dr. Hauser, I see potential for a fruitful dialogue between the biological sciences and ethics, especially natural law ethics.

However, I am unsure how science can reclaim such discoveries as authoritative. The NYTimes summarizes: "The moral grammar evolved, he believes, because restraints on behavior are required for social living and have been favored by natural selection because of their survival value."

If we grant that our moral sense is the accumulated, accidental, and unplanned result of the evolution of our ancestors, can a Darwinian natural law ethics be particularly binding? It's like an ad populum appeal to a population spread out across millions of years. The anti-traditional default position of modern liberalism discourages people from holding fast to the fixed customs handed down by their parents. Why should they adhere to the fixed urgings passed down from their ancestors' biology?

Besides such philosophical questions, there is also the danger that such valuable work will be compromised by the "anti-speciesist" stands now found among many academics. Take this introductory paragraph from the NYTimes:

Primatologists like Frans de Waal have long argued that the roots of human morality are evident in social animals like apes and monkeys. The animals? feelings of empathy and expectations of reciprocity are essential behaviors for mammalian group living and can be regarded as a counterpart of human morality.

Such forms can be hitched to an anti-humanist ideology, deriding the special consideration for humans. Some of these thinkers allege that if a moral sense is found among the "dumb beasts," that's just one more blow against humans' putatively prideful place at the center of their universe.

First, this ignores the group-selection claims of Professor Hauser. As chimps privilege chimpkind, humans treat their own better than another species.

But second, I wish to attack the idea that the discovery of a moral sense among animals somehow cuts down mankind.

Certain forms of Cartesianism, especially pop-Cartesianism, are hostile to any implication that there is a physical basis for mental actions. They treat animals as mere res extensa, lacking the capacity for thought. One story goes that Descartes, while deriding the state of animals, kicked a goat to drive home his point.

This Cartesian sensibility has quite influenced modernity, and has perhaps aggrandized mankind by treating the human species as angels incarnate rather than glorified mud. It is to God and to his chosen saints, rather than nature, that contains Cartesians' moral exemplars.

I suggest that the place of animals throughout Christian and even pagan lore frees us from thinking, like pop-Cartesians, that any kind word for animal ethics thereby enables the anti-humanist crowd.

Think Aesop, the ant and the grasshopper, the fox and the grapes. Ancient and medieval writers had few qualms about treating animals as moral exemplars, sometimes even their moral superiors. One of the Desert Fathers even said: "A dog is better than I am, for he loves and does not judge."

Also recall the imagery of the pelican, who in past times was believed to rend its own flesh to feed its children. This was taken not even as a mere moral exemplar, but as a symbol of Christ's crucifixion and the Eucharist. Because of the sacramental nature of creation, even an ethics that includes ancient primates for its early models can be redeemed.

Beowulf on Tape

Michael Drout has finished a commercial recording, to be released sometime in the future.

Recorded Books will be publishing the Beowulf reading later this year, bundled in a special offer for one of their programs that hasn't been completely decided yet, but I retained the rights to sell it on its own, and I'm working right now to put together some kind of inexpensive and interesting package. I did a short lecture on Beowulf as well that goes before the reading itself, and the entire thing takes up three CDs.

I shudder to think what an Old English scholar thinks an inexpensive price is for an audio edition of Beowulf.