Wittgenstein

 https://newcriterion.com/issues/1988/12/the-philosophical-porcupine

A name I have trouble remembering the proper pronunciation of  though it is really easy if one remembers that "witt" is VIT!

The linked is probably all one really needs to know about Wittgenstein ... as the linked says: 

In other words, in Wittgenstein’s view, philosophy—and by extension rational discourse generally—is helpless when confronted with anything that really matters.

So Wittgenstein claims to have shown definitely that philosophy is only really useful for showing what can NOT be shown by philosophy! 

far from being a positivist, . . . Wittgenstein had meant the Tractatus to be interpreted in exactly the opposite sense. Where the Vienna positivists had equated the “important” with the “Verifiable” and dismissed all unverifiable propositions as “unimportant because unsayable,” the concluding section of the Tractatus had insisted—though to deaf ears—that the unpayable alone has genuine value. . . . Wittgenstein’s silence in the face of the ‘unutterable’ was not a mocking silence like that of the positivists, but rather a respectful one. Having decided that “Value-neutral” facts alone can be expressed in regular proposition form, he exhorted his readers to turn their eyes away from factual propositions to the things of true value—which cannot be gesagt [stated] but only gezeigt [shown].

The positivists/materialists believe that all that matters is "particles and progress", Wittgenstein believes that it is the inverse -- it is what you CAN'T say that really ultimately matters!

Therefore in this crazy thought world, demanding vorcifiserly that there is no God, one of their main philosophers says that you can't know anything about that philosophically. 

My inclination though is not really "practical" ... that is what I tried to focus on (sometimes successfully) at IBM for 34 years ... so I may well try to understand Wittgenstein in more detail at some point. 

Fundamentals, Ten Keys To Reality

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/a-theoretical-physicist-gets-down-to-the-basics/2021/01/07/c9e65468-47c7-11eb-975c-d17b8815a66d_story.html 

The book would be better titled "10 Keys to Physics and Physicalist Reality", although the real purpose appears to be "how to convince those inconvenienced by souls that they don't have one". 

Frank is a pure materialist -- it is all "space, time, and matter". He likes to borrow phrases from Christianity, eg "born again", and apply them to materialism. One must be "born again" -- to a "complimentary" reality. Bohr first introduced complementarity --  "it is BOTH a wave and a particle", which always reminds me of the "New Shimmer", which is BOTH a dessert topping and a floor wax! 

Complementarity can be understood as the physics version of dialectics -- the ability to view issues from multiple perspectives and to arrive at the most economical and reasonable understanding of seemingly contradictory information and views. You dialectically can have your cake and eat it too!

Arnold Sommerfeld claimed (p 206); "It is clear that complementarity overthrows the scholastic ontology. What is truth? We pose Pilates question not in a  skeptical, non-scientific sense, but rather in the confidence that further work on this new situation will lead to a deeper understanding of the physical and mental world". 

If you want to understand "scholastic ontology", which is supposedly "overthrown", this would be a start. Ontology is about "what is" ... what "actually exists", what it means to exist, what category it is, the subject of universals, etc. --like quantum physics,  it is hard to pin down -- it is metaphysics. To attempt to simplify. it is pretty much a "world view" that has roughly three model/ontological positions: 

1. Realism says there is an external reality independent of human perception. ie. if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it, it still makes a sound. 
2. Idealism says that reality can only be understood via the human mind and socially constructed meanings -- the unheard tree does not make a sound, and thinking it does shows you are corrupted by the patriarchy. 
3. Materialism says there is ONLY the material world! Spirit and consciousness are illusions. Reality is all just meaningless random "stuff", including YOU! 

The scholastics were Christian thinkers who sought to understand general philosophical problems like faith, reason, will, intellect, realism, nominalism,  etc, and what could be "known" (epistemology). 

The book seems to present a fairly reachable high level understanding of the current "Standard Model" of physics -- Big Bang, Quantum Physics, quarks,  uncertainty principle, etc -- "reality" is just a complex arrangement of "mass, charge, spin" in Frank's mind. (assuming he has a mind -- true materialism calls the existence of "mind" into question!)

Where the book fails is that it is really just description of "stuff" ("matter", particles, forces, etc) that tries to lure one into thinking that if you explain the things we can observe and measure, that is all there is -- ie, placing  your faith in materialism is "being born again". We "know" there isn't anything beyond the observed because we have not observed it -- we "know" there are no black swans because we have not seen one! (there are, there is a book by that title that I read prior to blogging everything)

Of course we really don't know that, anymore than we can know if we have a wave or particle prior to observation. Honest faith in godless materialism philosophically "resolves" to determinism -- human choice - "Free Will" is collateral damage. Frank isn't comfortable with that, so on page 218 he declares that materialistic determinism and free will both exist through the principle of complementarity.  

However, on page 225, he decides that since you have read this book, the evidence for scientific fundamentalism is overwhelming and indisputable. "To deny it is dishonest. To ignore it is foolish." He goes on to deny that there is such a thing as a soul, but then at the bottom of page 227 he asserts that; "When we see ourselves as patterns in matter, it is natural to draw our circle of kinship very far and wide indeed". 

"Natural"? Frank has just provided a view of the MECHANISM of the universe -- he did not say WHY. The answer to why is a matter of faith, no different from the faith of materialism. I believe heaven and hell both exist, and our faith resolves our destination. I can believe that material exists and with the addition of the secret sauce of consciousness/will, it can build cool stuff and blow it up -- scientific materialism will never tell us whether to build a bomb or an MRI.

If you want to understand the current state of physics a bit better, this book is fine, just ignore the metaphysics, Frank didn't get a Nobel there. I'd recommend "The Fabric Of the Cosmos" as a better choice. 

Orthodoxy, Chesterton

 I find this to be a good summary of the book:

An influential Christian author of the 20th century, G.K. Chesterton wrote Orthodoxy as a defense of the Christian faith. Meant to be a companion to Chesterton's Heretics, Orthodoxy constructs an "alternative philosophy" to the philosophies of the time. Chesterton explains both why he believes that Orthodox Christianity best explains human existence, and why he does not find other philosophies convincing. However, in defending Christianity, Chesterton does not avoid the paradox, wonder, or mystery of Christianity either. After all Orthodoxy is--as the author himself notes--also a spiritual and intellectual autobiography as well, with Chesterton providing illustrations and examples from his own life. In fact, because of the autobiographical element, many readers are pleasantly surprised by the wit and humor with which he tackles the difficult subjects in Christianity. An important defense of Christianity, G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy is a highly recommended, powerful, and winsome book.

Chesterton is an author and thinker that I would love to love -- yet I find him challenging and not nearly as entertaining as many do. I do enjoy many quotations of his work. 

"A Christian is only restricted in the same sense an atheist is restricted. He cannot think Christianity to be false and still be a Christian; and an atheist cannot think atheism to be false and still be an atheist". 

"The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialists world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane". 

In this age of rampant virtue signalling it is hard to beat; "The modern age is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad".  In reading history, it is entertaining to see that it is always "modern"', which is naturally true.  It is always "modern". "Wokeism", Identity Politics, Mask Shaming and a host of other "modern" maladies are exactly moralism, puritanism, and The Scarlet Letter. The more mankind runs away, the more he runs into himself. 

It is a well loved work and I understand why, it is just "not my cup of tea" and I lament that fact.

 

Eschatological Conservatism

 https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-not-progressive-conservatism/

The article advocates "Progressive Conservatism". The difficulty with that name is that it includes the term "progressivism", which is the belief that everything is getting "better" without defining "better",  nor stating the assumed mechanism by which this will happen - more centralized bureaucratic government tends to be the default. 

Words and labels DO matter "National Socialism" sounds much better than "Nazism", and "Socialism" sounds a lot better than "Fascism", which is actually what we have today. The link concludes with a rather weak statement of what progressive conservatism would be.  

Historically, Republicans have been the party of vertical nationalism, and Democrats the party of horizontal nationalism. That kind of nationalism they left to the Democrats, to people like FDR. What was remarkable about the 2016 Republican victory was that, almost for the first time, a presidential candidate ran on a platform that united the two strands of nationalism. 

If that’s what makes the progressive conservative progressive, he is also a conservative who thinks that the government should suppress riots forcefully, that the police are owed our presumptive support, and that nothing good was ever born out of anarchy. He thinks that we’re self-deceived about our goodness and that a sense of justified anger too often serves to excuse crimes. 

Eschatology is the study of end times. In Christianity it is the second coming of Christ in power. The Mises institute defines Communist eschatology as: 

Communism was the great goal, the vision, the desideratum ($5 word for "what is desired), the ultimate end that would make the sufferings of mankind throughout history worthwhile. History was the history of suffering, of class struggle, of the exploitation of man by man. In the same way as the return of the Messiah, in Christian theology, will put an end to history and establish a new heaven and a new earth, so the establishment of communism would put an end to human history.

Well not really the "end of human history" in either case. For Christianity, it means judgement day, where every knee shall bow to Christ, and the "sheep and the goats" will be separated. The sheep to everlasting peace and joy with God, the goats to everlasting torment without God, 

The Marxist "utopia" has a distinct sulfur smell to those who enjoy freedom, diversity of thought, private property, etc. Marx wasn't much of detail guy, but most of the visions of Communist utopia include abolishing private property,  abolishing "individualism" (because everything and everybody us "flattened/equal"),  all property is owned and controlled  by "the collective", and "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs"

Why? Because Marxist faith is that human nature is basically good and Capitalism and religion have corrupted it. Once Atheism and Communism reign, then people will just "do the right thing" ... people will work and produce without any reward other than work itself ... and nobody will be jealous, lazy, etc

Historically, the results have been the opposite -- crime, oppression, poverty, disease, despair, etc,  As Churchill said "Communism/Socialism the equal sharing of miseries". Naturally, the Communists/Socialists say "it has never been done right". 

This has certainly proven true in the USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, N Korea, etc. China is marketed as an "exception", but is false advertising ... it is Fascist.

Fascism is the cooperation the of centralized big business/government control that allows carefully controlled profit, with totalitarian political control. The danger of Fascism is that well managed Fascism "keeps the trains running on time" -- sure, some of the trains may be going to the Gulag or gas chamber, but since all the guns have been confiscated, and the government is ruthless (step out of line and they kill you AND your family!) -- resistance is futile. 

So what might my dream of "Eschatological Conservatism" be?  

For starters, it is RESISTANCE! Right now, the 70 million or so of us that voted for Trump are being assimilated into what so far is relatively soft Fascism. We are being told it is to be a "time of healing" (they mean HEELING s... however as the lockdowns, mask mandates, continued disparagement of Trump voters and encouragement to turn in your neighbors if they fail to comply (Minnesota) show quite clearly, that "soft Fascism" has an alarming tendency to get harder. 

Arm yourself: 

Stop doing what you are "mandated" to do. If not now, when? Today you may get some dirty looks for not wearing a mask, and some criticism for going to church, but you ought to be able to see now how fast your "freedom" can be drained away. Are you going to get on the boxcars "for your own good" when they order you to? You will really not have a choice if you have no weapons. Are you going to stand by as they restrict your freedom bit by bit, and sometimes as in 2020, by leaps and bounds?

Quit accepting their "elections". They never accepted the outcome of 2016. Is Sniffin Joe your president? What even is a "president" in this banana fake "republic"? Thank God we are living in a divided territory! "Wokeistan" only completely rules the large increasingly crime ridden "S**Tholes". Those of us in the Red States still have a choice to RESIST our "betters". The 2020 stolen election is a wake up call to the level of peril we are in. 

If we are going to resist however, we need a better name. I'm bad at that ... "The Allies"? It looks increasingly likely that we need a divorce rather than attempting to reconcile with Wokeistan. 

In any case, is not a time for "HEELING"! 2016 was our last opportunity to heal after 8 years of surviving BOistan. If the "Wokies" had desired actual healing, that would  have been a golden opportunity to seek a return to respect for the Constitution, religious liberty, family, life, etc.  That opportunity has been terribly wasted. Biden, the Deep State and the MSM are holding out fake olive branches now if we will only fold and bow to their "woke" views. 

It is time for a real awakening of the type that the Allies provided for the last more limited Fascist regime of Hitler. Power is the only coin of this realm -- take it, defend it, and be not afraid. 

Christianity, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights actually understood, respected and followed is our flawed objective -- far from perfection or "utopia", however hopeful for a future that is "better" in the sense of more free, more abundant, more cultured, more friendly, more civil and more unified in thankfulness for the blessing of being "one nation under God". 

We were headed there in 1950, we lost our way into the wilderness of despair in the sixties -- we know where to go, we just have a long road and a lot of work to get there. 

I'm no fan of Nietzsche, however he said one good thing ...

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

The Denial Of Death, Earnst Becker

 https://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/06/books/reading-and-writing-life-before-death.html

Like the NY Times reviewer, this was the 2nd time through the book for me, with the other being long ago. The book was published in 1973 when it was still permissible to claim homosexuality, gender dysphoria, coprophilia, pedophilia, and necrophilia as "perversions" rather than "identity".  Even in 1982, when the review was done, such a book was allowed to be published and used in college classes, as it was in my philosophy class.  Surprisingly,  it is still available on Kindle, and even hardcover on Amazon if you are willing to part with $621! How long before it is banned?

Becker knows that the problem of life is death, thus the necessity of  the  "causa-sui" (self caused) project. Most people try to deny death by distraction with work, pleasure, drugs, other nostrums and addictions. Some choose art or beauty. Page 33, "The ultimate horror for Swift was the fact that the sublime, the beautiful, and the divine are inextricable from basic animal functions."  

in one of Swift's poems, a man in love with a beautiful woman laments: 

No wonder how I lost my wits; 

Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia shits!

Another common way of putting this regular reminder that we are physical beings with ugly smelly bodily functions is as Montaigne put it; "On the highest throne in the world, man sits on his ass". 

Mr. Becker asks us to be, or to try to be, heroic, and while this is a large order, it can be argued that we are constitutionally pointed in that direction. Also, it would seem that life is hardly worth all the anxiety, the frustration and the inevitable humiliation unless there is a hope of glory. Our movement toward glory may be a response to what Mr. Becker calls the "suction of infinity",  which I take to be a rather sophisticated substitute for the traditional notion of heaven.

So, somehow we need to deal with this most truly existential of problems.  Kierkegaard followed the Augustinian/Lutheran tradition said that education is facing up to this fact. Luther said, "I say die - taste death as though it were present". 

Becker is writing a secular supposedly "scientific" work, so he can't quote the bible, and I can: 

Romans 6:4-9:

6 Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

5 For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection:

6 Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.

7 For he that is dead is freed from sin.

8 Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him:

9 Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him.

"Science" denies the possibility of the metaphysical, which is why the book is a history of at best partial attempts to supposedly "deny" the stark fact of death. 

On 151, Becker says; "As philosophers have long noted, it is as though the heart of nature is pulsating in it's own joyful self-expansion". Indeed, J. Scott Turner has written a marvelous book on the reality of "nature pulsating in it's own joyful self-expansion" -- it is better known as LIFE! 

On page 198, we see Beckers summary of Kierkegaard's conclusion: "If neurosis is sin and not disease, than the only thing that can "cure" it is a world-view, some kind of affirmative collective ideology in which the person can perform the living drama of his acceptance as a creature". 

To put it more simply, we are BOTH saints(spiritual beings) and sinners (material beings). What we seek is transcendence -- once provided in the west by having and practicing Christian faith. Now tragically attempted by worshiping false gods of material possessions, wealth, political "wokeness", academic degrees, "science". etc 

On 215, we see; "A constant danger in science is that each gain risks abandoning ground that was once securely annexed. Nowhere is this more true than in the "role theories" of mental illness threaten to abandon the Freudian formulation based on bodily facts". 

"Bodily facts" = materialism. The assertion that everything, including us, is ONLY "stuff", the only thing to worship is the idea of "progress" -- it is getting "better" every day until ultimately the sun becomes a red giant and the earth becomes a cinder, or somehow we move to space and only cease to exist when the universe cools to absolute zero, or compresses to a mathematical point in the "big crunch". I have faith that if/when one of those things happen, I'll have no less time in heaven than the day I died. 

On 25, he paraphrases Kierkegaard and states; "faith is the hardest thing; he placed himself between belief and faith, unable to make the jump. The jump doesn't depend on man at all - there's the rub; faith is a matter of grace." 

Luther would agree. It is a GIFT from God through the fully human and fully God person of Jesus. 

For non-Christians, the book will ultimately be a disappointment. It is impossible for a human to succeed on their own to deny the fact of death. They can CLAIM that they are OK, but even in the case of Freud that results are bad -- irrational phobias, rage, mental illness,  addictions, etc  

The last sentence of this causa-sui(the search for immortality) project for a secularist is: "The most that any of us can seem to do is to fashion something - an object or ourselves and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak. to the life force". 

Order or chaos, God or the Devil. Choose you this day whom you will serve! It is the ultimate eternal "choice". 

Shapiro On "Unity"

 https://www.dailywire.com/news/shapiro-bidens-call-for-unity-means-shut-up-conservatives

My short answer to Biden's calls for "healing" is that he really means HEEL! 

If conservatives and Christians just roll over and celebrate abortion, transgender, gay "marriage", losing freedom of religion, destruction of the family, BLM, speech restrictions, loss of freedom of association, loss of the right to bear arms, ever expanding government, fake "elections", and one party rule -- then we will have "unity". At least for those that are not in the Gulag or dead. 

Ben's take ...

No, “unity” in the Biden formulation isn’t a recognition of what we have in common; it’s a demand that we silence ourselves in order to mirror Biden’s priorities. Unity, you see, can be achieved one of two ways: through recognition of the other, through a determination to understand those who think differently than we do; or through ideological domination. It’s rather obvious which pathway Democrats will choose. After all, social ostracization is one of their most powerful tools. Why disarm now?

So what is it that we have "in common? We breathe and bleed? 

When one tribe has lost respect for life, liberty and the pursuit of meaning (which requires a higher power that has created a purposeful universe), then what do we "agree" on outside of basic biological functions? 

Are we ONLY animals, "red in tooth and claw"? 

The Riddle of Joy

 https://www.amazon.com/Riddle-Joy-G-K-Chesterton-Lewis/dp/0802836658

Probably of most interest as an anchor for finding a bit about excellent works by both Chesterton and Lewis, however useful in itself. 

My favorite find from the book ... something I think I've heard before, but did not adequately  understand: 

In Augustine's sermon "On The Pure Love of God", he says:

"Imagine God appeared to you and said he would make a deal with you. That he would give you everything you wished, everything your heart desired except one thing. You could have anything you imagine,  nothing would be impossible for you, nothing would be sinful or forbidden But you shall never see my face." Why Augustine askes, did a terrible chill creep over your heart, unless there is a love for God, a desire for God? In fact, if you wouldn't accept that deal, you really do love God above all things. You just gave up the whole world ... and more, for God." 

A bit later: "Once again, love has instructed understanding. The fear of the Lord has been the beginning of wisdom". 

To begin to understand the importance of the "Face of God", reading the "Face of God" by Scruton would be time well spent. Scruton covers the "subject / object" issue very well. Why is the experience of the face of another human so special? Through that "little i", our soul detects a glimpse of the ultimate "I AM". 

Modern man's desire to "be God", through science, through technology, through "progress" to some ill-defined utopia (more likely to be Hell if he arrives) ... ANYTHING BUT GOD! Because in his heart he knows he loves God and his very nature desperately wants to year "well done, my good and faithful servant". However, like a 2 year old, he wants to "DO IT MYSELF"! 

Even though his endless searching is increasingly obviously only getting him depression, addiction, suicide, broken families, hatred, tribalism, etc ... and at his life's end, the terrible separation from the only source of life and joy. 

A worthy book, but I would recommend reading especially Lewis first, and also some key Chesterton. I'm fairly well versed on Lewis, this book convinced me I'm woefully ignorant on Chesterton, 

Sick Souls, Healthy Minds (How William James Can Save Your Life)

 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/17/books/review/sick-souls-healthy-minds-william-james-john-kaag.html

The NYT review is adequate. What strikes me about this book and the other Kaag book I've read recently is the great length that thinkers at the end of the 19th century were going to in order to try their best to survive in a world where they firmly believed that intellectuals were required to believe there was no God -- or eternity. As the title indicates, they were still somewhat desperately clinging to the idea of a "soul". 

Perhaps the reason James remains beloved by so many readers more than a century after his death is that his pragmatism often shaded into self-help. He believed in the power of positive thinking, in bucking up; he counseled action, and not just philosophizing, in the face of uncertainty; he may have even, from time to time, turned his frown upside down. But he expressed all of his (and our) struggles and their potential solutions in the smartest possible ways, and never pretended that a revised mood was a settled state of affairs. He knew that living is a continual process, and that perhaps the best we can hope for is just enough therapy to make it to the next crisis.

Abandon God, and with him the foundation of anything beyond the dogma of "change", and the "best" to be hoped for is "just enough therapy to make it to the next crisis".  Somehow, daily devotions and weekly/regular Holy Communion sound rather appealing in contrast. 

The undercurrent of my life up to retirement was "getting through it in anticipation of ...". You know -- "when I graduate from college", "when I get a good job", "when I get married" ... etc, etc. Never considering that realizing that I was living in The Kingdom of God NOW! I was already "there", having died to this world in Baptism, and now haltingly taking infant steps into my eternity with Christ. 

So I'm certain this book will not eternally "save your life", and may even proffer false palliative comfort preventing you from allowing Christ to TRULY save you in this life and the next. However, it is a nice short somewhat fluffy intro to Pragmatism. 

Hooker

 https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/richard-hooker-a-forgotten-father-of-national-conservatism/

Joseph Hooker is one of  -- if not THE foundational thinkers of Western conservatism. His short life, spanning the late 1500s was just post Luther, and in the midst of the foment of the Reformation and the seminal arguments on the relationship of church and state.

Hooker wrote in the 1590s, that high tide of Elizabethan intellectual and literary culture, which defined the shape of our language and culture right down to the present. While Hooker was in London drafting his Laws, Shakespeare was on the opposite bank of the Thames writing The Taming of the Shrew (which has some interesting thematic parallels with the Laws, actually),and Spenser had just returned to Ireland after coming to London to publish and promote his Faerie Queene. Francis Bacon was a leading advisor at court, just beginning his literary career. Like these other men, the scale of Hooker’s achievement looms up out of the relative mediocrity of his predecessors with a suddenness that can baffle the historian. Stanley Archer observes, “It is no more possible to account for Hooker’s achievement than for those of Shakespeare and Milton, Spenser and Bacon.”

He is particularly applicable to our time as we as Christians need to articulate "a vision of continuity amidst change" ...

To defend “the present state and legal establishment of the Church of England,” Hooker had to articulate a vision of continuity amidst change, a vision of national particularism amidst universal norms, that remains profoundly instructive and strikingly relevant today. Although Hooker’s own writings have all but “passed away as in a dream,” they offer us a basis for a profound and compelling national conservatism for our own day.

The article well states the essence of "conservatism", or what I believe to be the essence of rational thought -- walking the narrow and winding road between the netlist and the skeptic. 

He thus offers us the outlines of a conservative epistemology: that we must be modest in our judgments, and especially our prognostications about the future; that we must credit the wisdom of others as well as ourselves; that we must be relentlessly empirical, devoted students of human nature and observers of the world, ready to revise our judgments and plans when necessary. Yet for all this, conservatism refuses a flat empiricism or hollow relativism, convinced that beneath our half-baked plans lies a providential hand and that above our time-worn institutions stand transcendent realities; these provide us with purpose while warning us not to trust too much in our own purposes. Conservatism thus refuses both the certitude of the fanatic and the nihilism of the skeptic.

The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menard

 https://newcriterion.com/issues/2001/10/ideas-as-anecdotes

A clear case where reading the linked review is much more enlightening than reading the book. As a "group biography"of the initiators of Pragmatism,  the book is "decent" with insights into the life experiences, addictions, loves, families, etc of the subjects, but in knowledge "cash value", it has a very low signal to noise.

It is basically a "Supermarket Tabloid" for Pragmatism. 

... Peirce endowed ideas with the power to convert doubt into belief, annoyance into comfort, while James remarked that wrong ideas can kill us, right ones can save us. Menand recognizes that power—and tames it. He returns all questions to the realm of circumstance, where complexities may be narrated as personal conflicts. The result is an entertaining but superficial exercise in intellectual history, one in which ideas are wheeled on not because of their substance or truth value but because of their anecdotal force.

I'm all for simplification, however it seems likely that converting "War And Peace" to a Meme will leave out a bit! 

... For most people, truth and justice are lofty things best pursued disinterestedly. But for Menand, “making those kinds of decisions—about what is right or what is truthful—is like deciding what to order in a restaurant.” To distinguish between judging what is right and selecting an entrée, apparently, would be to venture outside the world of real human action.

This is a quote from Menard that appears in the review: 

The lesson that Holmes learned from the war can be put in a sentence. It is that certitude leads to violence. The key to Holmes’s civil liberties opinions is the key to all his jurisprudence: it is that he thought only in terms of aggregate social forces; he had no concern for the individual. This [the idea of community] was the conviction at the bottom of all Peirce’s thought. Everything James and Dewey wrote as pragmatists boils down to a single claim: people are the agents of their own destinies.

One might also observe current rioting and conclude that loss if fixed belief and chaotic thinking also leads to violence. Perhaps regression to an unredeemed human state leads to violence? 

I ran into this work because it was mentioned in a NR column. My view would be that mention was "grasping at straws". Yes, Pragmatism was an attempted response to the "failure" of the Civil War. How could BOTH sides be supposedly Christian, Civikized, etc and still have a war that killed over 600K? 

The thinking of that article, and many today is "how can this be happening"? 

To Christians and Constitutional Republic supporters, the answer is painfully obvious. When God and Law are abandoned, POWER is "god", and the establishment of who is most powerful requires violence in many forms.

Clearly, Pragmatism did not prevent war -- see WWI and WWII! 

Next to Hell, war is a walk in the park. As long as human pride is widely substituted for the fear of God, we can be certain that war will be with us! 

James Burnham and the Struggle For the World

 https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=66

The linked review is quite long and I believe accurate ... Burnham was a fearless, generally non-ideological intellectual genius. His life and thought presents a window into the largely leftist intellectual elite conflict of "control vs chaos" -- veers from being a Trotskyist, to a CIA employee, to a McCarthy sympathiser, to a prophet of "The Managerial Revolution", to an editor of the National Review with close ties to William F. Buckley. 

While he seemed to value not "settling" on any specific world view MUCH more than I, I do much respect his willingness to attempt to always have an open mind. In some cases, it seemed that his mind may have been so open that the brains fell out, his intelligence made his "above the fray of ideology / religion to be believable.  My perspective is that since his fear of being pinned down to a specific worldview became a fetish that was in fact much aligned with a worldview -- that the world is inevitably headed toward a specific ideology that is bureaucratic, "managed", and is quite close to Fascism. (Fascism is NOT "Nazism" -- it is bureaucratically managed collaboration between massive government and increasingly large corporations, with the "common man" increasingly disposed of (physically or metaphysically).   

I think he is essentially correct at a high level, though wrong on the specifics -- he thinks that Capitalism will be replaced by this "Managerial State". I believe what we see is that Capitalism remains as the "engine" that produces the wealth that supports the increasingly centralised worldwide bureaucratic state (Davos World). Trump and Brexit are either the last gasps of actual competition and freedom, or harbingers indicating that Capitalism and the Proletariat are much more elemental to humanity than Marx or Burnham believed. I pray for the latter. 

From the linked review on the Burnham path from Trotsky to "management". I am reminded of one of the things that tech people used to say about the last and supposedly greatest management "Flavor of the Day" idea to "improve"  -- "Management for management's sake". Hey, they needed to feel that they were doing SOMETHING! 

Kelly writes, “It is tempting to write off Burnham’s Trotskyist phase as wasted time, a six-year detour into the sterile world of left-wing sects. But this judgment would be wrong” because “the involvement prepared him for what would be his real career” (pp. 87–88). In 1940, Burnham’s first major work appeared and sold well. Called The Managerial Revolution, it showed the influence of Machajski, Rizzi, Berle, Means, Veblen, Thurman Arnold, and Lawrence Dennis, as well as of Trotskyism (pp. 95–96). Burnham argued that bureaucratic management was the wave of the future, even if it took such forms as fascism, communism, and the New Deal, depending on circumstances. Only a cold, empirical, social-scientific approach could tell us where we were headed.

This quote from the linked is a valid summary of the book -- though, as always, the map (summary) is NEVER the territory! 

Burnham’s books do have interesting and important insights—especially The Managerial Revolution, Congress and the American Tradition, and Suicide of the West—but the Cold Warrior Burnham constantly undermined the conservative Burnham (if conservative is the right word). He embraced empire, constant frontier wars, managerialist determinism, and the warfare state, while complaining occasionally about Caesarism, the decline of Congress and other intermediate institutions, the growth of federal bureaucracy, and the loss of traditional liberties. This circle could not be squared. Burnham seldom considered that anything other than big impersonal historical forces might be causing the things he bewailed, that actual human agents might be driving some of the seeming inexorabilities. As a result, his rather willful disregard of economic theory and his battles against “doctrinaires” such as Frank Meyer look like symptoms of a larger failure of vision.

Consilience Revisited

https://quillette.com/2020/09/09/at-the-intersection-of-art-and-science-revisiting-eo-wilsons-consilience/

I reviewed Consilience here -- naturally, you would be well served to go view that review! ;-) 

I enjoyed the linked as well. The basic thesis of Wilson is that randomness randomly happened in a universe in which humans randomly evolved to somehow acquire a innate "environmental imperative". 

For Wilson, evolution is "god", so naturally, since any "god" will have infinite powers, "anything is possible" ... and believable, to believers -- even "scientists". 

Postmodernism’s popularity, he argues, may be explained by the possibility that its “love of chaos” is part of a universal human nature. He sees postmodernism as possessing “a surge of ‘revolutionary spirit’ generated by the real—not deconstructed—fact that large segments of the population… have been neglected for centuries and are only now beginning to find full expression within mainstream culture.” But instead of it having “exploded human nature into little pieces…” he sees its rise as an opportunity to “set the stage for a fuller explanation of the universal traits that unite humanity.” In the sciences, he sees consilience as a necessity in order to gain full insight into human behavior: “Works of art that prove enduring are intensely humanistic. Born in the imagination of individuals, they nevertheless touch upon what was universally endowed by human evolution.” For the scientist, the desire to know the real world, to answer the “how” and “what,” is paramount, while for the artist, it is a desire to take that real world and expose it to imagination, intuition, and experience.

I firmly believe that "love of chaos" is part of Satan's nature, and one can detect the Satanic by “a surge of ‘revolutionary spirit’". 

Old Adam is indeed by nature sinful and rebellious -- and since we are created in the "image of God" our nature includes a desire to seek the order of God. Wilson seems to have a clue, however Satan is helping him mistake disorder for created order. 

How Many "Americas" Are There? And What is "Normal"?

 https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/coronavirus-pandemic-americans-divided-assessing-risk/#slide-1

Many of us realized a good while ago that we were not in "America" anymore -- you know, the one that built the Bomb, won WWII, landed on the Moon, created the PC and the Internet -- THAT America. 

"The Decadent Society" is one good book that covers our degree of lostness ... there are others linked there. 

I'd argue that we have been divided from the beginning, as everyone and every human institution is -- between "Control and Chaos" ... we "boiled over" in the Civil War, to some degree in the 1960's, and it looks like we are at it again. 

I think the linked is a worthy read if only as a root for some books that appear to be good .., I have "The Metaphysical Club" on order. 

The other big division is between being a practicing Christian and not being so. Everyone has a "god", and for a much larger percentage of the population today, the "god" they believe they have is government -- sadly, they are wrong in that assumption. The Bible makes it clear, you either serve God or Satan, when you cease to regularly participate in the Divine Service with the Body and Blood, Satan, like the dog waiting for table scraps, is there to take your reins.  

Government is a particularly nasty false god, since it has the power of the sword and the purse. Our Constitution split government into three branches with the hope that "faction" -- jealousy of power, would limit the dangerous "Leviathan"  and keep government as the servant of the people, who were in turn servants of God. It was a wonderful architecture -- but it required a religious people in order to continue to operate.  

So we are sadly divided with no shared foundational belief as to what this territory of N America formerly the "United States", holds as "truth" -- clearly in this failed state, there is no such thing for a majority approaching "self evident" truth. We are supposed to be "woke" to the tragedy of "Critical Theory".

Well, at least it isn't critical "fact" ;-(.

Gentle Regrets, Roger Scruton

https://philosophynow.org/issues/63/Gentle_Regrets_Thoughts_from_a_Life_by_Roger_Scruton

A brutally honest autobiography that expresses the guilt, shame, and redemption of a versatile and courageous intellectual, recently passed.

Sir Roger excels in appreciation of opera, architecture, wine and culture -- areas that I am but a philistine. The linked review does a great job of introducing the book.

On page 35, as Roger realizes that he is not going to be able to live an honest life by going with the dominant direction of postmodernism ... "What, I asked do you propose to put in the place of the bourgeoisie that you so despise, and to whom you owe the freedom and prosperity that that enable you to play on your toy barricades"?

Roger sees that reality is not only "particles and progress", and that the impulse to attack is born of a hatred of history, tradition, and ultimately God.

p 117 ... "It was only since becoming part of a family that I have become fully aware of the depth and seriousness of the opposition between the family and the State. The family has become a subversive institution -- almost an underground conspiracy -- which is at war with the State sponsored culture."

I'll be reading more of Roger.

The Rediscovery Of America, Jaffa

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41116095-the-rediscovery-of-america

I've discovered Harry Jaffa via the Power Line Podcast with Steven Hayward ... it is a great discovery. The subject book now has a LOT of tabs and markings, so if I lend it to anyone, laughter is assured!

The theme of the book is Natural Rights, and understanding that if one does not believe in Natural Rights, then the Declaration of Independence, America, and Western civilization have no foundation.

Page 108; "The mind frees itself from all sense perception whenever it employs a universal, that is, a common noun -- the ground and basis of what we call common sense -- is at once the basis of the most common experience, and the greatest of all miracles. It exhibits the mind detached from matter, understanding material things simply because it is detached from them." 

Page 109, "A philosophy or metaphysics that denies the metaphysical freedom of mind that was axiomatic for Jefferson can have no part in liberal education, for liberal education means education in freedom and for freedom. It means education in the metaphysical reality of such a universe that the Declaration of Independence proclaims." 

He states a truth I believe to be self evident on p154; "Of all the words that have poisoned public discourse, none has done more damage than the word "value" used as a synonym for moral or political choice".

If there are no "self evident principles", then all is "value" ... a relative term, so it seems sensible for you to have "your values" and I to have "my values" -- which "Moral Believing Animals" would state is not possible. We ALL believe in SOME set of universally applicable truths, and if we don't have significant intersection in those foundational beliefs, we have extreme difficulty communicating, because our human nature is irrevocably tribal outside of a shared moral reality.

Jaffa has harsh words for Bork, Harvey Mansfield, Rehnquist, Bloom, and others who call themselves "conservative" because they have knowingly or unknowingly denied universals -- in which case, John C Calhoun, defender of slavery was correct -- "Morality" just means "power" as in "Might is right". 

A superb book to discover the cost of the denial of universals -- deny god and you get Nietzsche and "all is permissible".  You can't prove (or disprove) God, however if you refuse to believe in him there is a definite earthy cost, and I believe an even harsher eternal cost.

Moral Believing Animals

https://www.goodreads.com/notes/19220626-moral-believing-animals/6923915-bill-berg?ref=bsop

Love the book, hate the title. Yes, we are "creatures", so "animal" is accurate at one level, however it is a dangerous term -- it can lead to genocide, abortion, euthanasia and all manner of depravity. "Beings" would be my preferred term., and a much better representation of the content of the book.

The book makes a strong case for what I believe to the clearest fact of human existence, EVERYTHING we do is "faith based". NOTHING is epistemologically "provable", since our very consciousness, which we don't understand, is running on wetware (our brains) that we also don't understand -- we ALL walk by faith, the only question is "in what"?

Science as we know it can only ever proceed by first placing faith in a set of unprovable cosmological, metaphysical, and epistemological assumptions and commitments." And science as we know it proceeds by hitching its wagon to a set of nineteenth-century general assumptions about civilization, progress, knowledge, and morality. Science may have put a man on the moon (which was itself a morally, politically, and emotionally pregnant endeavor). But we cannot say that science is exempt from the moral and believing character of humans and society. 

We all live a narrative ... a story, founded on nested sets of beliefs that are coupled with other believed relationships, which Smith models as "rafts" (worldviews)  ...

Well-educated moderns are, of course, socialized to see other rafts. We are educated to recognize, tolerate, and appreciate a diversity of perspectives, paradigms, and cultures. At least to a point. For this modern, Mult versioned self is itself, of course, an historically situated position constituted by faith commitments to particular basic assumptions and beliefs-about individuality, autonomy, cosmopolitanism, equality, relativity, self-expression, truth, and so on. And when occasions arise that threaten these trusted assumptions and beliefs, sophisticated, flexible, tolerant, liberal, ... etc. we fight, even to the death.

If you question any of the foundational beliefs of these well-educated moderns however ... by saying that there IS an absolute truth, and it isn't theirs, or that "equality" is a demonstrable metaphysical impossibility, their "tolerance" quickly becomes similar to that of a Muslim jihadi!

So, since faith is all any of us have, our task is to see that we are ALL in a "faith boat" (which itself is likely "floating" in possibly stacked other "boats") and those boats are not "equivalent", nor are any "scientifically true" belief systems that rationally allow us to look down on other belief systems past or present. As believers, our human tendency is to assume that OUR belief system is "enlightened", "progressive", "divinely inspired", "rational", etc.  We are like fish in water not knowing or even having the concept of "wet".

The world we bring into being through believing has for us become fixed, unified, total. We are thus not in the end very different in this condition than the medieval peasant from whom the Enlightenment promised to raise and deliver us.

The point, rather, is that for all of our science, rationality, and technology, we moderns are no less the makers, tellers, and believers of narrative construals of existence, history, and purpose than were our forebears at any other time in human history. But more than that, we not only continue to be animals who make stories but also animals who are made by our stories.

So, we are certain to believe (the question is "in what"! ) -- and tragically, we can easily select a nihilist narrative that life is meaningless and there is no hope beyond this mortal coil -- OR, we can believe that we are unique creations of a loving God with a divine purpose that can be given to us by Grace! (and many of us believe that faith is only through the GIFT of the Holy Spirit). 

Our individual and collective lives come to have meaning and purpose insofar as they join the larger cast of characters enacting, reenacting, and perpetuating the larger narrative. It is by finding ourselves placed within a particular drama that we come to know our role, our part, our lines in life-how we are to act, why, and what meaning that has in a larger scheme of reality.

On page 117, he seems to agree with a theistic, though not specifically Christian belief model: "and so I am inclined to leave the matter here and maintain the parsimonious theistic explanation as my proposed theory."  

 The book makes an excellent sociological / philosophical case that humility is the root of wisdom ... in complete agreement with Socrates and the Bible. It does however make that case in a somewhat technical manner that may be difficult for some.

Mansfield, Manliness

A classic work to explore the very modern idea that "Manliness" is "bad", and the eternal issue of "Nature vs (or in concert with?) Nurture (social pressure/constructs),

To get the left view of the book I chose this review the Harvard Crimson.  Not surprisingly, it ignores one of the major themes of the book, understanding "Thumos"  ... "spiritedness", "passion", "drive", "courage" ... whole books are written on the subject, and it is quite visible today as Trump is very much an embodiment of Thumos.

The New Criterion has great coverage of this fact in this article.  ...

Most people don’t think of Plato when they think of Donald Trump, but they should. Our usual forms of political analysis—both the more rigorous, like academic political science, and the more popular, like the conventional wisdom of political journalists and commentators—utterly failed to come to grips with the Trump phenomenon. They did not predict his success as a presidential candidate. To the contrary, they confidently, repeatedly, and erroneously predicted his failure.

A way to understand the "Enlightenment" is "Mind over Matter" ... and as "matter" is worshipped --  history, classic literature, religion, and also philosophy, are consigned to the "dustbin".  The worship of matter is the worship of "particles and progress" ... relentless, inevitable (it is hard not to be a determinist if one is a materialist, a discussion of many posts). In any case, the assumption of "modernity" is that any of the old Natural Rights thought is simply bunk -- Darwin, Nietzsche, and Marx have repealed all those "myths".

So as Mansfield laments, men have decided to just roll over and submit to the program of the feminization of culture -- but have they really?

As I read the book, an old model that I read somewhere and can't remember, and I'm CERTAINLY not going to take credit for inventing! is that humans are darned easy to understand.

When a man walks into a room, his underlying snake brain (subconscious)  evaluates the other men in the room to see if he is confident that he can adequately handle any of them should they challenge him.  The same low level functions evaluate the females for "desirability".  If there are any "standouts" in either category, these will come to conscious attention ... along with assessment of "friend or foe".

The female snake brain does a similar evaluation -- what is the "attractiveness ranking" of the women relative to her, where do the men rank on "desirability".

One of the major modern dilemmas is that materialist science is increasingly showing the power of these "lower level" materialist elements vs the "higher level" conscious functions of nurture, culture, etc. Our believed "mastery" over the "mere material" as science advanced in results through technology led us to believe we could subdue ALL the "mere material", including the material of which we are made (flesh).

Predictions the development of Artificial Intelligence (see 2001 a Space Odyssey)  the ability to create "life" ,,, which it turns out we have a very poor idea of what it even is, and likewise consciousness, have led even some really intelligent scientists to question some of the more basic assumptions of secularism, humanism, feminism, materialism, etc ...

Western civilization "sold its soul" (denied it even had one), and as Mansfield discusses on page 121, when you kill god, you get nihilism and the ubermensch. Tired old ideas like Christianity, created soulful behaviors like Gentlemanliness ,,, throw out the baby of the manger and you get the Satan of Nietzsche!

"Darwin's theory by destroying the specialness of human beings denies that nature can be a standard for them; "nature" is merely what evolves by chance, and thus has no authority for us. This very denial makes nature into a standard for us in the phrase "survival of the fittest"-- first a description of what happens, then a prescription of how men should behave".

Nietzsche understands human nature very well, and applauds it ... "Man would rather will nothingness than not will" ... "That is of course a statement about human nature and it's perverseness. It implies that the low and the high are permanent elements of in man and that if the low does not serve the high, the high will serve the low".

On 239, Mansfield says "If you are weaker, you have to pay more attention to the context than if you are stronger, I believe it really matters that women are weaker than men, and that is why I have mentioned the fact more often than a gentleman would have preferred."

I question if anyone truly denies this ... being a fairly robust 6'4" 300 lb male, I'm comfortable walking up to a group of bikers or a rough looking bar. While our current feminized society is working hard to create female superheroes ... Elsa, Black Widow, etc, on a day to day basis in the real world, does that actually work? We can imagine a lot of things, but reality is often far different from our imagination.

On 37, we get a succinct definition of Manliness: " What does a John Wayne or Theodore Roosevelt show us about manliness is it's completeness. A manly man is nothing if not an individual, one who sets himself apart, who is concerned with the honor rather than the survival of his individual being. Or to better say, he finds his survival only in his honor."

At the very bottom, the definition of a secular "real man" is as simple as Rhett Butler ... "Frankly, I don't give a damn!"

Churchill's Trial, Larry Arn

https://www.amazon.com/Churchills-Trial-Churchill-Salvation-Government/dp/1595555307

https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/mass-effects-in-modern-life.html

It's a "trial" in the sense of difficult challenges he dealt with, not a court trial.

A delight to at least students of Churchill. While much of our study of Churchill focuses on his life prior to him being summarily dumped from office in 1945 after having saved the nation and the world from the scourge of National Socialism. Naturally, the British people were ungrateful and anxious to be coddled in the warm reptilian embrace of socialism. As one of history's certified great men, Churchill was not particularly angry -- he understood human nature very well and realized that ever since the Garden of Eden, man has been extremely prone to accept false promises.

The quote we all need to keep before us as the population again, even efter many harsh lessons, returns to the siren song of Socialism:

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”

From his "Crazy Speech" that helped him lose the 1945 election:

I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart, that no Socialist system can be established without a political police…No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently ­worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.

I'm reminded of the excellent "Liberal Fascism" which covers the "why" of this statement in more detail. It is human nature to work for our own gain, and do be the ones who decide how the fruits of that gain are apportioned -- we may well be very generous, however there are few among us who joyfully pay our taxes. Increasing force is required to achieve the goals of any form of Socialism, be it labled "National" (Nazi), or a cover for Communist (USSR).

On page 225, Arn recounts an interesting observation from actual excellent politicians in a Democracy from Churchill ... "They are quite downcast and offended when the (nasty) cartoons stop. ... they murmur; " We are not mauled and maltreated as we used to be. The great days have ended.""

Democracy is messy, Totalitarianism in any form is very quiet with the exception of massive STAGED hordes of shouting masses all of coerced single mind "Heil Hitler"! The people "loved" the leadership of the USSR -- as long as they were forced to at gunpoint -- and then the "beloved" statues came down. 

On p 182, Arn summarizes the population of a modern near-Socialist state, numbed by the "Mass Effects": 

"Their opinions shaped by the "machinery" of the press and widespread diffusion of standard  views. Education was "universal and superficial", it produced "standardized citizens, all equipped with regulation opinions, prejudices and sentiments according to their class or party". 

Sounds a lot like much of the current population of the west!  

The Reichstag Is Still Burning, Jaffa

https://americanmind.org/features/the-reichstag-is-still-burning/

A brilliant essay by a newly discovered (for me) brilliant thinker, Harry Jaffa. My introduction is by way of the entertaining and educational Powerline Podcast, which I regularly enjoy while taking my walks.

An excellent discourse on one of my common themes -- when universals (like "chair" being a useful descriptive term) are denied, then statements like "all men are created equal" become meaningless, since metaphysical abstraction is denied along with metaphysics. If ALL is MATERIAL, and there is no use in any abstraction that can't be "resolved" (as in Object Oriented Programming) to a specific physical "object" (experimentally verifiable fact/thing), then all we can work with are "white men", "black men", "gay women", "undefined gender beings", etc ...

This discourse gets us quickly back to Hegel - Heidegger, who in believing in Historicism (that history is "progressing" to "the correct thought"), and Hegel declaring "we've arrived", then "universals are what smart people declare they are" (in this case Hegel).

Modern "progressivism" declares "there is no end" -- although thinkers like Francis Fukuyama have extended Hegel/Heidegger to say "we are REALLY there now" in "The End of History". 

When we can no longer think in terms of "all men", we are driven to "white men" and their "privilege", or a "Master Race" because POWER ("Might is right") is all that matters in the world of the completely physical.

The title refers to the example of American educational system being driven to add and remove areas of study through riots and physical violence, so that study of "dead white men" (the ancients, the founders, the Bible, Shakespeare, etc)  were driven from the academy.

How Sir Roger Scruton Became Conservative

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2003/2/why-i-became-a-conservative

A superb answer to why I am a conservative. Your time would be well spent reading the article! A few nuggets ...

Law is constrained at every point by reality, and utopian visions have no place in it. Moreover the common law of England is proof that there is a real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power, that power can exist without oppression, and that authority is a living force in human conduct. English law, I discovered, is the answer to Foucault.

The abstract is unconstrained, reality is always constrained.

Whether you call it "modernism", "progressivism", "materialism", or "liberalism" it all boils down to the faith that there is no such thing as transcendence or God, it is ALL "particles and progress".

Modernism in architecture was an attempt to remake the world as though it contained nothing save atomic individuals, disinfected of the past, and living like ants within their metallic and functional shells.

A snippet of Sir Rogers thoughts after being allowed a visit to Communist Prague in 1979, and his closing of why he does not despair. Just read it!

To put it very simply, I had been granted a vision of Satan and his work—the very same vision that had shaken Burke to the depths of his being. And I at last recognized the positive aspect of Burke’s philosophy as a response to that vision, as a description of the best that human beings can hope for, and as the sole and sufficient vindication of our life on earth.

Henceforth, I understood conservatism not as a political credo only, but as a lasting vision of human society, one whose truth would always be hard to perceive, harder still to communicate, and hardest of all to act upon. And especially hard is it now, when religious sentiments follow the whims of fashion, when the global economy throws our local loyalties into disarray, and when materialism and luxury deflect the spirit from the proper business of living. But I do not despair, since experience has taught me that men and women can flee from the truth only for so long, that they will always, in the end, be reminded of the permanent values, and that the dreams of liberty, equality, and fraternity will excite them only in the short-term.

As to the task of transcribing, into the practice and process of modern politics, the philosophy that Burke made plain to the world, this is perhaps the greatest task that we now confront. I do not despair of it; but the task cannot be described or embraced by a slogan. It requires not a collective change of mind but a collective change of heart.