The Medicine Goes Down

The outer party is staging a bit of a protest against the Cathedral at the moment.

Some context.

When the inner party moves the nation forward a bit quickly, it takes a bit of time for said progress to be digested by those paying for it.  Digesting the progress of the Cathedral is the function of the Right in democracy.  The outer party's protest accelerates the digestion process of outer party loyalists by easing the pain associated with relaxing the gag reflex, while the media's loud shrieking augments the pain of exercising said reflex.  Eventually, tender reader, the medicine goes down.

And as the bureaucracy implements the medication, those who claim to have never swallowed are rendered quite irrelevant.

A suggestion for those fruitlessly striving to deliver better government to Americans than that which they so richly deserve: do not interfere in a state of affairs over which you possess no control.  Abstaining from mitigating the harmful effects of an evil process accelerates the ending of said process, which must, in any case, run its course.  An evil, carried to a certain point, necessarily consumes itself and America, tender reader, is long past the day of no return.

Rousseau: Pretentious, Absurd, Dangerous

The thought of Rousseau is convoluted nonsense and merits a proper thrashing.

If I took into account only force, and the effects derived from it, I should say: "As long as a people is compelled to obey, and obeys, it does well; as soon as it can shake off the yoke, and shakes it off, it does still better; for, regaining its liberty by the same right as took it away, either it is justified in resuming it, or there was no justification for those who took it away."

Were Rousseau correct that shaking off the yoke of oppression were better than obeying it, there could be no virtue in obedience.  In Rousseau's narrative, the people - unable but to act well (in obeying) or better (in disobeying) - is an (the?) everlasting source of goodness.  The Creator, in this telling, is replaced; and the people, tender reader, will go on creating - rights, laws, heresies, bureaucracies, democracies, and other contradictions as, we are told, is their right.  I fully expect this unfortunate trend to continue until a day of rapprochement with their Creator and corresponding reacquaintance with truth.

Lest we forget, though, to obey is to act rightly.  The people that obeys does well insofar as they possess the collective manifest power to disobey.

But the social order is a sacred right which is the basis of all other rights.

Social order is sacred (and, as we see here, a broken clock is right from time to time) - but not only is it not a right; nothing is.

Nevertheless, this right does not come from nature, and must therefore be founded on conventions. 

The benefits (what might be called manifested rights or a sort of acquired privileges) afforded by force over time are in a way demonstrated by conventions.  Social convention, like all manifestations of human action, is almost entirely effect, cause in only the most peripheral, meager, and small of ways, and the wellspring of little of original worth and nothing of ultimate consequence.

Obey the powers that be. If this means yield to force, it is a good precept, but superfluous: I can answer for its never being violated.

The tender reader will dutifully note that the omniscient Rousseau vouches for man's obedience to the powers that be!  The pretension of such a stance is matched only by its absurdity.  Despite the hostile schemes, bloody streams, and painful screams staining the rotten plains of all man's history, the tender reader should rest assured that Rousseau's knowledge, which is as free of bias as it is of gaps, contains no exception to his fantastic rule: the powers that be are always obeyed.

Were such a position plausible, could there ever be a senseless struggle or can the dear Rousseau also assure us that no bloody slaughter has ever been anything but sensible?  To ask this question is to answer the implicit one: no - Rousseau is not a worthy thinker, but he is a dangerous one.

When Knowledge Is Consent

The degree to which Joseph de Maistre possessed very nearly unparalleled understanding goes widely unnoticed by the mass of humanity.  The limits of knowledge are those of its nature, after all.  The poor man's wisdom is despised, yes, and Maistre's oeuvre is woefully deficient of fashionable declamations.  But it is Maistre's grim, dark, raw tone - born of his intensely pessimistic outlook, defiantly steeled heart, and supremely unaffected perspective - that disturbs all but those of the most stern literary tastes.

Perhaps recognizing the effects such reaction might render, Maistre was reluctant to take up the pen:

Joseph de Maistre himself was quite aware of the distinctive character of his prose style. In November 1797, at a time when his literary reputation was growing and he was becoming known as the author (though anonymous) of his first important work, Considérations sur la France , and he was asked by a representative of the future King Louis XVIII to write something about the situation in France following the coup d’état  of Fructidor, he declined, explaining that ‘my style is so well known in this country that if the piece appeared they would recognize my pen, and I would be buried alive.’4  And again in 1804, by which time he was posted to St Petersburg as the Sardinian ambassador to the court of the tsar, when he was asked a second time to lend his pen to the French royalist cause, Maistre cautioned against the proposal on the grounds of his style: ‘[...] there is a kind of danger that I will never allow myself to confront: it is that of my style which is too well known. Certainly, I do not mean to brag, for there is nothing in common between better  and different.'

The humility; the grandeur.

Motivation is a funny thing.  Inspiration may come from any number of sources.  Maistre on matters of intelligence, ignorance, and action:

The essence of all intelligence is to know and to love. The limits of knowledge are those of its nature. The immortal being learns nothing: he knows by nature everything he should know. On the other side, no intelligent being can love the bad naturally or by virtue of his nature; for this to be so, it would be necessary for God to have created man evil, which is impossible. If then man is subject to ignorance or evil, this can be only by virtue of some accidental degradation, which can be only the consequence of a crime. The need, the hunger for knowledge, which stirs man, is nothing but the natural tendency of his being that carries him toward his primitive state and shows him what he is. 

If I can so express myself, he gravitates toward the areas of light. No beaver, swallow, or bee wishes to know more than its predecessors. All these creatures are happy in the place they occupy. All are degraded, but are ignorant of it; man alone senses it, and this feeling is the proof at once of his grandeur and his misery, of his sublime prerogatives, and his incredible degradation. In the state to which he is reduced, he has not even the sad satisfaction of being unaware of himself: he must continually contemplate himself, and this he cannot do without shame; even his grandeur humiliates him, since the understanding that raises him to the angels serves only to show him the abominable tendencies in himself that degrade him to the brutes. He seeks in the depths of his being some healthy part without being able to find it: evil has stained everything and man in his entirety is nothing but a malady.[Hippocrates, Letter to Demagetus.] An incredible combination of two different and incompatible powers, a monstrous centaur, he feels that he is the result of some unknown crime, some detestable mixture that has corrupted him even in his deepest nature. 

Every intellect is by its very nature the result, single yet in three parts, of a perception that apprehends, a reason that affirms, and a will that acts. The first two powers are only weakened in man, but the third is broken, and like Tasso's serpent it drags itself along,[Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, xv, 48.] completely ashamed of its sad powerlessness. It is in this third power that man feels himself fatally injured. He does not know what he wants; he wants what he does not want; he does not want what he wants; he would want to want. He sees in himself something which is not he and is stronger than he. The wise resist and call out, Who shall deliver me?[Romans 7:24.] The foolish surrender and call their cowardice happiness, but they cannot rid themselves of this other will incorruptible of its nature although it has lost its dominance; and remorse, piercing them to the heart, constantly cries out to them, By doing what you do not want, you consent to the law.[Ibid., 7:16.]

By doing what you do not want, you consent to the law.

When speaking of divine law (as if any other could exist) is knowledge not consent?  Are wings for flying?

What does man want?  Nothing and everything.  Our problems are general, while our solutions are particular.

I happen to think I'm capable of achieving pretty serious shit.  Yet I lack motivation.  Although I'm a mere man, I think I know that nothing ultimately matters in general.  Or I want to believe so?

But still ... I care.

Doing what I do not wish may fool my family, friends, neighbors, but false pretensions persuade not the conscience.  I know what I'm capable of and I will hold myself accountable.  The small voice whispers, reminding that cowardice is only happiness to the ignorant; I'm not ignorant.  I know that each moment is best used to do the least disorderly thing.  Plus a bit more stuff, endowing this quip with a bit more, shall we say, meaning.

There is no escape.  So what to do?  Well, in a word, everything - not in general but in particular.  The Duke:

Hard pounding this, gentlemen; let's see who will pound longest.

One Is Not Just A Number

People grasp varying degrees of forms.

The only real truth is one.  Not one idea, statement, word, phrase, philosophy, or dogma.  One.

There can only be one such essence because that which is most fundamental is indivisible and the only entirely indivisible essence is singular in nature.  The ultimate cause is forever one.

It is through an implicit sense of this overarching dominion of Him that the perceptive intuit order, patterns, and connections amidst the chaos.

The more order you see, the higher the share of your life's works appear as rote, seem expected, feel as drudgery would.

Not to brag, but I think I'll document what I mean by this post sometime.

In the meantime, there is other work to be done.  Why?

Because, to me, there are worthwhile endeavors for me to achieve.  Goodness is inherently so; worth needs no justification.  At least to mere man.  And I am a mere man.  But fear not, tender reader, for I do intend to document some of what this post refers to in time.

Joseph de Maistre

Many valuable points are made here.  One snippet particularly worthy of passing along to my plentiful readers:

Epigrammatic grace too was what Maistre marveled at in Latin, which he was horrified to see everywhere replaced with the vernacular. Du pape mourned the vanishing of Latin inscriptions from public places: ‘[i]nstead of that noble laconism, you will read tales in vernacular language. The marble condemned to babble weeps the language that gave it that beautiful style that had a name among all other styles, and that, from the stone upon which it had established itself, threw itself into the memories of all men.’24 Maistre’s emphasis on memorability suggests another reason why he forged his posterity with a written orality. The folly of revolutionary leaders was to believe that writing was  real, rather than the pathetically dissonant and enfeebled echo of that higher Word that is alone operative; and that passing laws was all that was needed to make them be respected. Maistre’s terse scripting was hence a bid to prove – with the paradox that nearly always enveloped his thoughts – that the spoken human language that was a degraded version of God’s own could engrave itself in hearts everlastingly like the true natural law. For when they carried truth, the spoken word and its succinct written analogue were endowed with an eternity absent from Enlightenment dissertations, philosophic gibberish, revolutionary debates, and the tiring blathering of salons that were havens of flattery.  

In short, if hard marble could no longer shelter brevity, Maistre’s pamphlets and lyrical dialogues could. As genres that elevated conversation over dissertation, they had something of the constantly unfinished and occasional about them that made them natural containers of the unspeakable.

This.

The thinker worthy of being understood is rare - perhaps one in tens or hundreds of thousands.  Most of these, offering exemplary demonstrations of how not to think, nonetheless were endowed with the requisite intuition to identify and illustrate the vacuity of thinkers still more misguided than themselves.  A few actually have decent thoughts.  And then there are sages.  Their words do not argue, but show; their words do not persuade - or at least do not appear to, clothed as they are in the phrasing of revelation, not argument.

It's easy to read; it's hard to understand.  By understand I mean recognize the sages, which is to master the dark arts of revelation.  The chief of the dark arts is Joseph de Maistre.  I put together a bit of a reading list for those who wish to understand the glory of Maistre.

First, tender reader, recognize that in the realm of thinking anybody popular is not serious.  Moving on.

Those completely innocent of the dark arts would benefit much from a genuine reading of such writers as Lewis, Derbyshire, Locke, Buckley, Hobbes, Burke, Arendt, Babbitt, Solzhenitsyn, Buchanan, Nisbet, Machiavelli, Sowell, Rand, Hazlitt, Meyer, Chambers.  A diverse crew, but families are unhappy in many ways.  While these are not writers of much depth, they are, unlike the likes of Dennett, Coulter, and Krugman, actual thinkers.

Those innocents with a taste for actual thinkers should then embark upon the serious ones.  Popper, Bastiat, Rothbard, Weaver, Schumpeter, Kirk, Mencius, Russell, Arnold, Cicero, Godel, Hayek, Heinlein are serious.

If one enjoys abusing his newfound smell for the serious, he is ready for a bit more rigor.  Queue up Chateaubriand, Mises, Dostoevsky, Malebranche, Tolstoy, Augustus, de Jouvenel, Descartes, Anselm, Schopenhauer.  These are learned men made of stern stuff.

If the tender reader digests the stern stuff, he is ready to dive into the deep stuff.  Filmer, Bossuet, Carlyle, Evola, Bonald, Fenelon, Davila are not for the faint of heart.  Few are aware of these names.  Among the fashionable, these thinkers are not recognized, but their views are shunned; among the elite, dropping one of these names is a bit of a signal and commands respect.

 Thinkers of higher calibers than these proprietors of deep stuff are few - very few.  But they lived, which is marvelous.

They are the sages.  Each sage is distinguished by a kind of majestic intuition that adeptly dissects the most fundamental matters pondered by man, eclipsing all of us.  And understand, tender reader, that to a thinker of this caliber we are all mere students.  In fact, they are not thinkers but sages, possessing a clairvoyance that appears to intent readers of their works as mental flashes, glimpses into a higher and fuller comprehension precious few have ever imagined - let alone understood.

These flashes are glorious.

Plato, the sage of all sages, is the ideal to which all thinkers aspire.  The history of philosophy is the series of footnotes to Plato's thought, except for a few addenda provided by sages.  The darkest, deepest, and most glorious addendum was contributed by Joseph de Maistre.

Relentless retrograde, supreme champion of hierarchy, most able defender of Throne and Altar, Joseph de Maistre is the Reactionary par Excellence.

An aristocratic personality caught in the midst of massive social upheaval, Maistre wrote with the raw bitterness of a man who saw and understood far more than Providence should had permitted were his intellectual tranquility of any import at all.  Alas, tender reader, it was not and we may enjoy "The Saint Petersburg Dialogues" and other masterworks as a result.

Reading Maistre is to intrude upon a disturbed mind.  Penned in the fluid testimony of oratory that speaks not its purpose, his works take on a profundity few these days can even recognize.  Maistre wrote with lucid, prophetic style that, betraying a grasp of the human condition supreme in conviction, bears down upon the most dearly held modern presumptions with a weight that increases according to the reader's understanding and imagination.  Writing of the essential and the eternal, death, order, sacrifice, and violence all figure prominently in Maistre's work, but the essence of his revelations, central tenet of his orphic testimony, title of his glorious addendum is divine authority.

Read him, tender reader.

Romantic Love's Corrosion

The marriage, fertility, and demographic crises plaguing the West are all to varying degrees attributable to a fabrication.  To be specific, not unlike social science and separation of powers, enduring romantic love isn't.  The epidemic of divorce (the first of our three aforementioned crises) is caused by a few factors, but Nydwracu hits the nail on the head - gay marriage ain't one of 'em.

Contemporary dating is a bit of a meat market in the West.  And the women riding Roissy in their 20s only to live with cats in their 40s in beyond had the misfortune to have been born into a culture infused with the values of Vronsky instead of those of Levin.  Yes, tender reader, there was a bit more to Tolstoy's masterwork than the city/country dichotomy.

Why was Levin shunned?  Put differently for the tender reader who suffered the abomination of having read The Catcher in the Rye instead of Anna Karenina in high school: why these days are the values of restraint, prudence, humility, discipline, and faith less valued than even the Crown, which so sadly says so very much?  The causes of our marriage crisis are certainly many, arguably complex, but definitely not homosexual.  There's perhaps nothing so misunderstood as the arranged marriage.

Leftism is the fluoroantimonic acid to society's organic matter, destroying the bonds that ensure peaceful, orderly, and civilized society.  Like many outdated vestiges of the West's bygone era, arranged marriage is both a symptom and a cause of robust social bonds, which form the very fabrics of sound cultures and harmonious societies.  Specifically, monogamy channels the sexual energies of beta males in a productive manner.  Given that beta males tend to do pretty neat stuff like defend society, invent technologies, and work hard, it's a decent idea to ensure the channeling of said energies.  The ideal of monogamy guarantees men sexual partners and women financial support and material protection and, given that throughout human history 80% of females and 40% of males reproduced, common sense suggests this is a good deal for society to enforce generally.

Assuming a bond must be forged, the higher the share of those individuals who will be impacted by the bond approving of it, the more likely the bond will cultivate communal goodwill, ensure collective stability, and, not least of all, endure.  Indeed, the breakdown of long-term arrangements is far from limited to marriage.  I fear societal corrosion will compound as agents of the spirit of rebellion carry on towards the end Cathars, Lollards, and Roundheads have so inadvertently worked towards, which is the degradation of cohesive society into debased, atomistic, commoditized social decay.  And legal gay marriage has got nothing on the Condolamentum.

In any case, the trust I place in Plato to deliver instructive insight when contending with the spirit of rebellion is justified once more.

Though we have seen that romanic love isn't enduring, it's not that Platonic love is inherently so - such that one may be instructed as to where/how to find it.  Instead, tender reader, it's that Platonic love is the offspring of belief and discipline; it can be acquired not by action but through experience.  We must, after all, imagine Sisyphus happy.

The Hearts of Frenchmen

Everyone's yapping about this NSA boondoggle of a jobs program.  Thanks to Snowden, Progressives have a new and quite improved tampon for their ever-intensifying menstruations; it's called PRISM.

The Judge has decided to chime in.

Andrew Napolitano is that rare bird in America's cesspool of a political arena that appears to possess sufficient common sense, intuition, and integrity to have found his way to the libertarian conservatism of the Old Right early in his life.  And he admirably sticks to these principles, shining quite brightly when framing his Old Right perspective in the populist common sense characterized most aptly by Andrew Jackson's slaying of the many headed monster.

Please consider, tender reader, how many heads our current monster possesses before ascribing much success to Old Hickory's valiant effort.  In fact, as Ron Paul supporters can surely attest, we face more multi-headed monsters today than Old Hickory faced heads!

That might makes right does not preclude the efficacy of whining necessarily.  But let us be clear: it depends upon your objective, but not only upon your objective.  Indeed, the complaining of a certain Texas Congressman awakened thousands of young minds to such heresies as Austrian Economics and states' rights.  Nonetheless, the more intuitive DailyPaul zealots will come to know a deep and foreboding darkness upon realizing that no matter how consistent their beliefs, logical their arguments, or benevolent their motives, the Old Right is dead.  Deader than a door nail.

Take heart, tender reader, for no matter how monstrously profligate, absurdly incompetent, and profoundly misguided our government becomes, the restoration of stable, orderly, and worthy government depends not upon the consent of the people at all.  Oh, no!  And were it not for this single blessing, there could be no hope for better days.  Human agency is certainly not by which constitutions are formed - and they are through which they are formed only as His instrument.

Americans, please note that constitutions are those collections of social institutions, religious dogmas, personal prejudices, corporate privileges, spiritual beliefs, and cultural traditions that limit, extend, direct, and impact in myriad unseen manners the exercise of power in society.  Your Constitution was worthless long before your grandfather was born, but your constitution prospers.

The miracle of sovereignty is divine and the formation of sovereign power is an effect of Him.  We men only participate in His designs.  This participation is worthwhile to the extent that one acts in an orderly manner, since it is only by sufficiently limiting the corrosive effects of disorder that we may hope to accelerate the restoration of true governance.

Basic common sense informs that those fundamental laws truly governing temporal societies may not be articulated without degrading their integrity to a degree.  Similarly, truth cannot be spoken to mortal power without a modification in the distribution of temporal power itself.  Sophists have long sought to claim that there is power in truth, but actually there is virtually none.  Power is sooner the master of truth than its servant, which is why the wise man says little.

In any case, back to the Judge's take on the USG's latest jobs program.  Again, Andrew's a straight shooter, a good man.  Andrew's views on Constitutional matters are sound enough that were limits to American governmental power enforced by those ink blots intended to do so by being placed on paper in the 18th century, he could plausibly even today be writing for the majority as Chief Justice of SCOTUS instead of whining for the minority as chief legal polemicist on Fox.

Alas, we live in a world where men - not ink blots - rule.

Gentlemen, the Salic Law is written not upon paper but upon the hearts of Frenchmen.  Take notice.