Sloughing to Gomorrah Indeed

Liberalism moves … toward radical individualism and the corruption of standards that the movement entails.  By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constitutes, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified … Liberalism can prepare its way for … the artificial, mechanized or brutalized control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.

Robert H. Bork, Sloughing Toward Gomorrah; Modern Liberalism and American Decline

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Bork makes the case that modern liberalism (as distinguished from classical or traditionalism) is destroying America.  It is an impressive case.  Yet, I see few in politics (but for some conservatives) who make this case.  And, I see few in politics who represent traditional or classical liberals and offer thoughtful opposition to modern liberalism.

Likewise, I see few clerics, few in the media, in academia or the law who offer a critique of modern liberalism and school us as to the damage it has done and is doing.

Recently I watched a documentary that purported to explain the political mess in Washington whereby collaboration and congeniality among liberals and conservatives has ceased. The documentary blamed the paralysis on Americans who held traditional values and ignored the ruckus caused by proponents of modern liberalism.  It ignored the fact that for every action there is a reaction.  Such blindness does not help.

In looking briefly at Bork’s criticism of modern liberalism one might see what the documentary misses:

• corruption of standards: think FBI and the Justice Department as each has been revealed to us
• destroying traditional social habits of the people: think the destruction of the family, the dispatch of religion from the public square, abortion, infanticide and the hyper-sexualization of culture
• dissolving the natural collective consciousness into individual constitutes: think identity politics
• licensing the opinions of the most foolish: think cable news, TV networks, major metropolitan newspapers, and attention given the views of “entertainment” celebrities
• substituting instruction for education: think Leftist ideology and the indoctrination centers that primary and secondary schools and colleges have become
• encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom: think late-night and midday television “pundits”
•  the upstart rather than the qualified: think Ocasio-Cortez and her cohort
• artificial, mechanized or brutalized control: think of national health care, the Green New Deal, Venezuela and the attack on the U.S. Constitution.

Sloughing to Gomorrah indeed.

Shalom.

 

 

 

Aristotle on Anger

Recommend Highly – Historian Victor Davis Hanson has written a MUST READ essay entitled “Autopsy of a Dead Coup” which explains and identifies those in politics, the Washington bureaucracy and “consulting,” law, intelligence apparatus, media and celebrity who violated the law in an attempt to dislodge a properly elected President while ignoring the legal transgressions of his former opponent and her aids.

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Aristotle … believes that when we feel anger in the right amount, at the right time and toward the right people, it is virtuous.  Without it we wouldn’t stand up for ourselves or for important principles.  Failing to feel anger when we are wronged is a vice … (Emphasis added.)

Edith Hall, in “Aristotle’s Pursuit of Happiness,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec 2-3, 2019

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I have for years now felt disgust for those who, having been wronged, do nothing about it.

Alas, Aristotle tells me why I fell that way.  In failing to stand up for yourself, you license another to pursue an evil path and in doing so you forfeit your dignity and the dignity of others who might well be the next victim of injustice or evil.  Yes, doing nothing you advance corruption of the culture and the victimization of others.

Failing to stand up for yourself is cowardice.  Nothing makes a man look worse that a failure to defend himself from those who abuse him or others, especially those who are vulnerable.  How I wish I did not see this conduct in men … but such a man says to us in his inaction this: those who will not defend themselves will never defend you.

He who will not act on righteous anger does endorses corruption and rewards evil.  How dare these people impose the fruits of their failure on others!

A chain is never stronger than its weakest link.  “Weak links” hurt us all.

Shalom.

Schopenhauer’s Question

“How is it possible that suffering that is neither my own nor of my concern should immediately affect me as though it were my own, and with such force that it moves me to action?”

Arthur Schopenhauer, in On the Foundations of Morality

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This is precisely the kind of question that is not asked by individuals in America today.  It is precisely the sort of question in which we are of a very desperate need.

Its absence is the product of our failed education system – especially university education and makes its absence in a secular culture that denies God in favor of “trivial pursuits.”

Yes, what we concentrate on does not seek the feel and understanding of the mystery that this implicit in this question and others of its ilk.

I give you one such distraction that is our preoccupation.  It is “equality.”

Who images any one person is in every measure the equal of another in very detail?  No one who is thinking.  Yet, we chase in all sorts of “social justice” pursuits “equality.”  Likewise such a notion allows us to divide in hostility one from another.  Such estrangement does great damage – separating us woman from man, and by race, religion and income.

Yet over all these separations and distractions – one stops to help another who suffers.  One risks one’s life for another. We do this because we are who God made us to be in the doing of such things.

In contrast, the political climate separates us and with God in exile we grow further apart and weaker as people and as a nation.

My constant frustration is this: I see hardly anyone in public life who lives as if they ever ponder as Schopenhauer’s inquiry so clearly does.

We ought to be ashamed and less a pack of complainers and more individuals with interest in the defining questions of life that make us far better people and a stronger and more faithful nation.

Shalom.

Full of Themselves …

“Once we go down the path of abstraction we’re taking moral risks, psychological risks.  We become drunk on ourselves – full of ourselves.”

Walker Percy (as reported in Robert Coles, M.D.’s book The Secular Mind)

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” … becoming drunk on ourselves – full of ourselves.”  It sounds like an abstraction itself but what if it is descriptive of us, of who we are – and who our “leaders” think they are?  And worse yet, what if those leaders act on this drunken misconception?

Walker Percy (himself a Catholic convert, medical doctor and extraordinary novelist) went on to say this to Coles: “Thomas Aquinas … worked his mind hard so he could understand God’s intentions.  But today, even our theologians aren’t interested in God … ”

Percy continued “a lot of folks believe in their beliefs, they believe in their ideas, they believe in themselves, and maybe they believe in someone’s politics or some social cause … ”

Centered in the head (in abstraction) creates moral and psychological risk.

Ironically, we have come to see Percy’s observations rooted in all manner of people who know little of God, history, great literature, psychology, philosophy, or moral theology who careen thither and yon in the public square like characters from a Monty Python movie telling us: “a wall is immoral,” “suspend the ‘presumed innocence’ in all “he said, she said” allocations, infanticide – once murder – is now hunky-dory … etc.

Moral and psychological risk indeed … add risk of social chaos and a rise in instability, suicide, mental illness, random violence, addictions, idleness and overwhelming discontent.

Former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia wrote of the concrete manifestation of the moral risk to which Percy referred in his presentation entitled “Mullahs of the West: Judges as Moral Arbiters” in which he was rightly highly critical of the present expectation that judges will act as “moral arbiters.”

Says the Justice: ” … there is no reason to believe that law-trained professionals can discern (the right answers to moral questions) more readily than, say medical doctors or engineers or ethicists or even the fabled Joe Six-Pack.” Yet, I add in concert with Justice Scalia this is precisely what activists judges and Leftist politicians and policy makers do today.

So this is where we are on many fronts – abortion pursuant to rape becomes “choice,” which becomes killing a child on the eve of or after the child’s birth.

Liberals have led us to the moral and psychological wasteland that Walker Percy and his colleague (Doctor, writer and psychiatrist) Robert Coles saw so clearly four or five decades ago.

Now that you might see, what will you do?

Shalom.

 

Freedom and Responsibility

Back after a day of travel …

So long as men and women believed themselves to be responsible beings, called to choose, and accountable to God for their choices, life might be tragic, but it is not trivial.

Sydney Cave, in The Christian Way

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Ah, yes … and when Christianity is attacked, shunned and meant to be made unimportant how will we avoid the creation of tragic and chaotic circumstances and horrendous deeds – like infanticide, opiate use and producing early death, or random murders, preying on the innocent, the stripping of all that is in human sexuality and destroying the family?  And who among you understands the relationship between freedom and responsibility?

Who in the public eye connects faith and responsibility.  Surely not the Socialist whose view of God is much like that of a Communist – namely, that God neither matters nor exists (translation – God is an unwelcome competitor to those who desire all power reside in them so they might be gods and goddesses.)

When a culture departs from individual responsibility in favor of the scapegoating of a select group (“old White men,” capitalists, people of faith … etc.) it ushers in an age of terror and precipitous decline … as we see now in Venezuela … and the Democrat Left’s embrace of infanticide and the abolition of Constitutional freedoms long ago clearly defined.

Shalom.

 

Approval vs. Trust and Respect

Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner.

Lao-tzu

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In politics and in the visual-image culture we have – gaining the approval of others is a common and prominent goal.

When you think about it – this is an invitation to deception … it inevitably has one mask who they are and what they think.  In this, discourse is false – a charade … words are abused, images shaped and the individual contorted.

In politics, as in advertising, we are purposely deceived.  Campaigns for political office are quite the same as ad campaigns for hair coloring, soap, a snappy new auto, etc. – all nonsense.

Tragically the sleepy guardians of truth – the news media – has long ago abandoned ship.  They, too, reflect and protect the phony image of their choice.

Deep down inside the approval-people are shallow.

This would all be fine if the consequences were only that of a farcical French comedy but alas we live in a dangerous world where others aspire our death and destruction and where real, finite material measures like national debt and national security exist.

So now we come to reports of Cuban troops and secret police in Venezuela in violation of international law – along with Russian, Chinese, Turkish and terrorist presence, and the decade long neglect of our military (particularly during Mr. Obama’s occupation of the Oval Office) and the inexcusable billions of dollars give-away to Iran authored by Misters Obama and Kerry.

The point?  Conforming one’s life to approval makes you a prisoner to what is untrue, false and hence destructive and befuddled.  In contrast, a person who is confident and competent is one who seeks not the approval of others but their trust and respect.

Since the Presidency of Ronald Reagan fewer and fewer public figures have earned our trust and respect.  Approval never trumps candor and competence and is but an opaque screen designed to deceive for personal gain.

Shalom.

 

Adultery and Losing Trust

Adultery is injustice.  He who commits adultery fails in his commitment.  He does injury to the sign of the covenant which the marriage bond is, transgresses the rights of the other spouse, undermines the institution of marriage by breaking the contract on which it is based.  He compromises the good of human generation and the welfare of children who need their parents’ stable union.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2382

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When one dishonors the marriage by committing adultery – one: (a) shows his or her lack of integrity, (b) violates our covenant with God as reflected in the covenant of  marriage, (c) abuses one’s spouse and bestows on the spouse a grave injustice, (d) undermines for all the sacred institution of marriage, (e) damages the culture at-large, and (f) undermines the morality, virtue and welfare of children and others.

Each party in an adulterous relationship is responsible for the damage that is done by such behavior.  Each diminishes themselves in a deeply significant and serious manner.  Each party to the adultery establishes that they are to be neither trusted nor held in esteem.

The next presidential election will be a referendum on the moral state of this culture, national government and this nation.  I say this because we have a series of very dubious positions held in the areas of sexuality, family, abortion, equal application of the law applied parties holding privileged positions for whom the law seems not to have applied.

The present climate necessitates that we ask ourselves is this candidate a person to be trusted?

On the Democratic side we have a candidate who seems to have falsified her heritage by claiming a status as a Native American that she does not possess in order to secure a position at an American university.

Another women candidate seems to have committed adultery with a married man (and notable womanizer) who enjoyed a political status that allowed him to advantage his adulterous partner by helping her receive several lucrative positions in state government.

So the question might be: can you trust someone who falsifies their background to secure a position she does not deserve, or trust an adulterous woman who used her adultery to parley a few choice jobs at taxpayer expense?  Stated another way do you want to led by people lacking in character, morality, honesty and virtue?  

Have we not enough examples of poor behavior and are we now in a critical place where we need people of virtue in positions of leadership?

For what it worth, I have found in my lifetime that those who cannot be trusted are seldom bright or trustworthy … succumbing to acts of distrust they lack good character and strength sufficient to warrant positions of leadership in any venue.

Shalom

Interesting – Isn’t it interesting that today’s woman can wrap herself in the “Me Too” movement and at the same time can excuse or overlook a woman’s (or their own) adultery notwithstanding that being a partner to adultery itself is a painful betrayal to another woman who stands by as an innocent.  This sisterhood thing only goes so far … you put in on and you take it off.  No honor or consistency there.

Child Sacrifice

… every abominable thing that the Lord hates they have done … for they even burn their sons and daughters in the fire …

Deut 12:31

Abortion should be listed as a weapon of mass destruction against the voiceless.

E.A. Bucchaineri

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Well New York Governor Cuomo signed into law a bill that approves abortion up to and including the day a woman is to give or is giving birth to a child.

Try to deny that this is not returning to child sacrifice.  Try to tell me this is merely a “choice.” Try to convince me that this ought to be lawful?  Is humane?  Justified?

Think about this: in the ancient pre-Christian world child sacrifice was not uncommon.  Think about this, too: we now have Leftists in the Congress who attack Christianity, desire to exclude God or any reference to God from the public square or any public gathering.  Think about this as well: in a culture where contraceptive means are reality available women have come to use abortion as contraception.

Finally, what could be going through the mind of a Governor who would think that abortion performed on a child about to be born is acceptable, moral, a good idea or defensible?

Democratic members of the New York state legislature stood and applauded upon hearing that the Governor signed this bill into law.  So much for the Democrat Party – the pro-infanticide political party.

A child is not something to be owed to one, but is a gift.  The “supreme gift of marriage,” is a human person … the child possesses genuine rights … “the right to be respected as a person from the moment of conception.”  (Emphasis added.)

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2378

Shalom.

Neglecting God

God created man in His own image …

Gen 1:27

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Why would God create us in His image?  A fair question – with an easy answer.  The answer?  So He might have a relationship with us and us with God.  And wherein is the epitome of intimacy and love everlasting.  Yes, the very thing we all long for in our mortal life is given to us right from the beginning of life and time.

God’s love of us is central to our well-being, contentment, happiness, strength, meaning, purpose, peace and identity – the one cardinal Truth that banishes all failure, hardship, setbacks, sufferings.  Yet, we so often ignore this fundamental reality.  But, why?

Pride is the most common reason.  Pride would have us try to make life work to our design.  Despite our failures and the loneliness and stress that our pride produces – we persist … until one day we resign ourselves to this fact – we cannot succeed or be at peace when we neglect God and the truth of God’s omnipotence and God’s love of each one of us.

Still others neglect God for they fear God is a wrathful, unforgiving God – while God is a merciful God.  Yes, people by into fear and the false identity that is pervaded by others that God is not a loving God.

Remember Jeremiah 29:11 – “I know the plans that I have for you, plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and hope.”  (Emphasis added.)

Why would anyone wish to neglect God in favor of making life more difficult and less certain and stable?  Think about that today and tomorrow … until you come to your senses.

Shalom.

 

Sin and Wisdom Lost

… a sin which is pleasurable deserves greater censure than one which is painful.

Marcus Aurelius, in Book II of Meditations

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We don’t talk much about sin these days – and, consequently, we know little or nothing about its nature and gradation.

The above comment makes a very, very significant observation.  Sins that are pleasurable deserve greater punishment than those that are painful.  Why would that be?

Sins that are pleasurable are committed by one who is eager to gratify his or her own desires, wants – and acts without regard to the other (often innocent) person.  That sinner is insincere and cares not about the anyone but himself or herself.  This is a selfish and callous person – a low life.

Sins that invoke pain are the product of one who losses control because of some injustice.

I give an example: two colleagues are in joint enterprise – one to fight for and protect the other from those who intend harm to the one who needs protection.  In the course of joint efforts to protect the one in peril an argument and harsh words are exchanged.  This sin is the product of the fight, of the effort to battle against a third-party aggressor.  It is anger among friends, loved ones, comrades, brothers, brothers and sisters, a husband and his wife, a wife and her husband.

Unlike those sins that are born of selfish desire – sins such as I describe here arise from the love of one another and in pursuit of protection and justice. These are far less objectionable than those sins that use others and are self-serving.

How desperately we need a classical and rigorous education.  What we have now is pitiful, embarrassing, debilitating, self-destructive.  In this state of being we find few people of courage and few friends.

We are poorly educated and calamity is the principle product of such failure.

Do you see what insights and wisdom are lost to us?

Shalom.

Postscript – Those who stand and fight with you may, in the course of your shared combat, on occasion argue with you.  They stand and fight with you because they love justice and you and lend themselves to your aid for no particular gain.  They are people of honor and among the best friends you might have.

In contrast, those who know your struggle but stand apart from you are indifferent to you and your suffering.  Being indifferent they will not argue with you for they have no stake in what happens to you.  Welcome to the world as it is.