Jokes can often be windows to the truth. There’s a great carton of The Far Side where one scientist tries to explain to his compatriot that two wrongs marinated by the right amount of technobabble do make a right. It’s a joke that doesn’t need to be explained since the truth it’s illustrating is one that we’ve all been taught since we started walking. But like all obvious truths, it’s one that is usually clouded by rationalizations of all types and species. That is the reason why Minneapolis is burning.
I shouldn’t have to iterate why the four officers who killed George Floyd were in the wrong or why—from the various videos that have circulated on social media—why Floyd’s death is manslaughter at the least. Nor should I have to say that I think that the four former officers (they have been fired from the Minneapolis PD) should have charges filed against them and that they should be punished to the full extent of the law. The videos and the facts speak for themselves more eloquently than any person or commentator can. But I shouldn’t also have to say that pillaging and burning stores, fast food restaurants and affordable housing complexes is not a blow for justice or a strike which aims to right a wrong.
Justice is a harsh virtue, in the first place because punishment is linked to it. Receiving what is due to us—from our actions and works and words—is not pleasant when a brief recollection points to the type of compensation we will receive. There is a very good reason why innocent children love justice and why adults ignore it for the much more comfortable idea of mercy. But justice is also a harsh virtue because of what it demands from us when we dispense it. Since justice is giving to another what is due to him, anything less than or more than that tips the fragile scale and renders our actions towards him unjust. Justice must be tightly harnessed to reason so that our own actions do not slip to villainy. But this is the rub since our emotions carry us away so many times. We hear about the man who hit his mother and our immediate reaction is to beat his head in; we read about the CEO who swindled hundreds of elderly people from their savings or the priest who molested an altar boy and our immediate emotion, our immediate feeling, is to hurt them as much as possible; never mind what their actions deserve in the strict measuring of justice.
I can’t imagine the anger that people feel regarding George Floyd’s death but I do know that a Target, an Autozone, a Wendy’s and an affordable housing complex had nothing to do with his death. I also know that the people who owned those businesses and the people who worked in them had nothing to do with his death. The only conclusion then is that the destruction of those places and the destruction of hundreds of people’s livelihoods and homes wasn’t justice. It was revenge, pure and simple.
This would be the time for leaders to be able to hold more than one thought in their head at once: to condemn Floyd’s death and to condemn the mobocracy that has made part of Minneapolis a holocaust. But, as is to be expected in our times, the leaders have failed: whether it wasJoy Reid trying to make a compare and contrast that could only make sense in Wonderland or Don Lemon saying that while he wasn’t condoning looting, he also couldn’t dictate how people were supposed to react; furthermore, he said that it was up to white people to eradicate racism, not black people’s. This take was worse than Reid’s, which was standard for people on both side of the political chasm today. But Lemon demands the impossible according to the logic of the contemporary progressive movement: Since the late 60s, with the publication of Charles Hall and Stokely Carmichaels’ Black Power, the idea has been that white people are intrinsically racist towards minority people. They wrote that no matter how liberal a Caucasian becomes, his whiteness will always make him an enemy, to some degree, of black people. Intersectionality and critical thinking reiterate this idea. But if white people are hopelessly and perpetually racist, how can responsibility for ending racism fall on their shoulders? It sets up a neverending and descending cycle of violence: Every evil or disadvantage suffered by black Americans will be blamed on the perpetual racism of white Americans, justifying in many cases, the sort of pillaging and burning that we saw in Minneapolis and after the flames die down, the refrain will be repeated that it is up to white people to end the cycle…and then the process will start over again. And more people will suffer.
There may be numerous ways to end this cycle and no doubt multiple people will propose policies and laws and procedures to prevent what happened to George Floyd from happening again (good) and to promote a critical, theoretical idea of equity for society (bad) but, from my perspective, the only way to permanently end it will be to recapture our ability to see each other as human beings.
The thing that separates us from all other living bodies in the world is our rationality, something that has been recognized as far back as the gadfly, Socrates. Rationality, like so many words, has suffered the indignity of being narrowed in terms of its understanding. We think today that “rationality” refers to the ability to calculate, to think in terms of loss and gain, to juggle equations; to be a living computer, a mentat. If that was all that rationality meant and all that separated us from a cockroach or a gorilla or a puma, there wouldn’t be any point in being human. Machines are machines, whether they are biological or not and being a living computer is as far from being a human as being a termite is. Rationality, properly understood, includes that calculating part but also the ability to wonder, to imagine, to ask, “Why?” and “Why not?” and to see things from another person’s perspective. It is the ability we have to realize that while we are all unique—thanks to human DNA that was never seen before our birth and which will go extinct with our death—we are also all united by the bonds of our common humanity, given to us by a shared human nature. We are, in the best sense of the word, snowflakes; made from the same stuff, but each wonderfully different. It will only be by recognizing this ability, this spark, in every other person—even the people whom we detest, hate and spend every day opposing—that we will be able to stop other cities from suffering the fate of Minneapolis. When we see this ability in everyone we encounter, on and off screen, we will recognize the little miracle that each person is and when that happens, we will more likely restrain our emotions and pursue actual justice. That will require throwing out all the ideologies and fads that pigeonhole us into different categories based on skin color and sex and socioeconomic position—things like critical theory and intersectionality—which will necessitate a long fight. But at this point, we really have no choice unless we want the suffering and misery to continue.
British philosopher, Sir Roger Scruton, born in Buslingthorpe, England, has one similarity with Wisconsin born, American actors and director, Orson Welles–both men should not have to wait for death for their names to become household names. Welles, who died in 1985, missed that goal. Hopefully, Sir Roger will have better luck.
Reading Scruton’s bio on his website, someone might be tempted to think that there is a very good reason why his name is not a more common and recognized one; much of his accomplishments read like the achievements of many other academics. And so, while he might be held in repute among academic philosophers, his name shouldn’t be expected to breach the borders of other niches.
But, as James Delingpole has written, this bio, while factual, does not tell the whole story, such as the fact that Scruton smuggled banned books and supported dissidents in Communist Czechoslovakia. It also does not detail the fact that what makes Scruton so worthy of being considered a treasure of the West today is that he is an actual philosopher. It’s true that philosophy departments across the country are shrinking, a victim of universities focusing time and resources on sports, medicine, law and the harder sciences. But there are still plenty of philosophers in circulation who, for the most part, are not engaged in actual philosophy. A brief overview of some recent philosophical articles will give an idea: “In Defense of Madness: The Problem of Disability” (“At a time when different groups in society are achieving notable gains in respect and rights, activists in mental health and proponents of mad positive approaches, such as Mad Pride, are coming up against considerable challenges. A particular issue is the commonly held view that madness is inherently disabling and cannot form the grounds for identity or culture. This paper responds to the challenge by developing two bulwarks against the tendency to assume too readily the view that madness is inherently disabling…”); “Beyond the Call of Beauty: Everyday Aesthetic Demands Under Patriarchy” (“This paper defends two claims. First, we will argue for the existence of aesthetic demands in the realm of everyday aesthetics, and that these demands are not reducible to moral demands. Second, we will argue that we must recognise the limits of these demands in order to combat a widespread form of gendered oppression.”); “Racial Justice” (“‘Racial justice’ is a term widely used in everyday discourse, but little explored in philosophy. In this essay, I look at racial justice as a concept, trying to bring out its complexities, and urging a greater engagement by mainstream political philosophers with the issues that it raises.”)
Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Scruton does not go for whatever is popular and in vogue at the moment; he takes seriously the etymology of his field, “love of wisdom,” and, like Socrates, is continually asking questions that are not what the cultural powers that be claim we should be asking, but questions we need to ask, such as what is beauty and do we need it in our art and architecture today and what is the nature of conservatism and why it is better for the environment. His work has been deemed of such importance (in the past at least) that he was appointed as Chairman of the Building Better Building Beautiful Commission, which, it should be noted here, was an unpaid advisary position to the Tory government.
And that is the real reason why Scruton has been made a pariah. Scruton not only asks question and does what he can to make society think, but he also is an unapologetic conservative, becoming one after witnessing and partaking in the riots in France in 1968. Which is why he has been, for all intents and purposes, expelled from British society, as far as the ideologues on the left in Britain are concerned.
Last month, Scruton was interviewed by The New Statesman, a leftist magazine for which Sir Roger used to write as its wine critic. The interview–to put it bluntly–was a fraud, a hunt to find a few, select quotes that could be used to destroy Scruton’s career. And that is what happened, to a very large degree. Deputy editor of New Statesman, George Eaton, announced that the interview he personally conducted with Scruton was full of “outrageous remarks,” which caused the British Housing Minister, James Brokenshire announced that Sir Roger had been immediately and unceromoneously sacked from the aforementioned chairmanship on building beauty; George Eaton responded to that news by posting a picture of himself drinking from a bottle of wine and declaring that this was feeling he had knowing that he had gotten “racist” and “homophobic” Scruton fired from his government advisory job; a post that has since been deleted.
No good deed goes unpunished, Socrates.
Douglas Murray of the UK Spectator, dissected the cheap tricks Eaton pulled; one of which was, as Mark Steyn described it, “talk[ing] to you for two hours and then pluck three partial quotes uttered twenty-five minutes apart that destroy your career and get you banished from public life.” One example: Eaton claimed on Twitter that Scruton stated in the interview that every Chinese person was just a replica of the next one, which was a “very frightening thing.” Since this seemed out of character for Scruton, people questioned Eaton on Twitter and, relenting, the deputy editor said that he had editor Scruton’s answer for purposes of editing and space. On the Chinese, Sir Roger had actually said, “They’re creating robots out of their own people by so constraining what can be done. Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.” In other words, a “racist” statement was actually an attack on the Chinese government, which with its soon to be fully implemented social credit program, is moving closer and closer to making each of its citizens a cell of the Chinese Communist Party.
In a normal world, this would be seen as nothing more than a smear attack. And, to be honest, the push back against the New Statesman and Eaton has been sweet to observe. But it’s because of “accountability journalism”–the idea that a reporter’s job isn’t to objectively report the facts and let the readers decide for themselves but to actively twist and mold a story to hold “those in power accountable”–this smear attack against one of the greatest living Western philosophers was able to happen in the first place. Scruton has questioned the sacred cows of postmodern leftism, not just [post]modern art but Islamophobia, homosexuality, foreign policy; things which the cultural elites do not want people talking about unless it’s to agree with them in lockstep. In other words: You can be a philosopher (much like you can be religious) as long as your questions don’t target the status quo.
But, of course, the job of real philosophy isn’t to act as a “yes man” to any one person, group, party, or course of action. It’s job is to QUESTION so that from the questions, we can arrive closer to the truth and from knowing the truth, grow in wisdom (the whole “love of wisdom” again). And that is a terrifying proposition for most people, regardless of which side of the political chasm they’re on because being questioned about you assumptions, your beliefs, your ideas, you risk your entire worldview collapsing because you open yourself to the idea that you are wrong. And if that happens, with what framework will you replace your broken one?
More than that, knowing the truth, means that you will be pricked by your conscience to change your behavior. Once you know that your ideas or incomplete or incorrect, you cannot in complete honesty hold to them. You must either rationalize why they are still right, regardless of the holes in them and the evidence marshalled against them, or you must learn to be comfortable with the cognitive dissicence of still holding a wrong idea. And change, as everyone who has worked to break a bad habit knows, is difficult, uncomfortable and challenging.
This is the reason why Socrates was killed by the Athenians. His questions probing them as to the nature of justice, piety, good government–concepts that had been taken for granted for generations–threatened the Athenian’s worldview and their way of life; it threatened their comfort. As such, he was charged with impiety and sentenced to drink hemlock. It is the same reason why Roger Scruton was attacked. Because in a world that does not want to think, because it is already convinced that it has the truth, philosophy and philosophers are not welcome.
Thomas Jefferson said that he would rather have unsure freedom than docile safety. Jefferson, today would be in the minority as most people, in and out of the United States, would rather choose safety then freedom. Part of the reason is that safety is comfortable, something that everyone wants.
One of the many drawbacks to that is that comfort makes us think that we will never see a terrible event. Of course, terrible things happen in the world; newspapers would be thinner if they didn’t and social media much duller. But they never happen to us and we do not witness them. Those things happen to other people.
This is a main reason I think the world reacted as it did to the burning of Notre Dame Cathedral. Something that had stood in Paris for 850 years and which had become a globally recognized building is not supposed to burn. It isn’t supposed to be destroyed. Since it has always been standing in Paris, it will continue to always be standing in Paris. If it is destroyed—because, we have to admit if pressed, these events are always possible—it will be destroyed sometime in the nebulous future, after we are all safely dead.
The silver lining from a tragedy like this is that it is these events that often bring out the best in people. Christians and non-Christians reportedly stood in solidarity and sang as the cathedral burned; several billionaires have pledged small fortunes for the rebuilding; President Trump called President Macron and Pope Francis to offer the assistance of the United States in whatever capacity.
It was also a time for the worst in humanity to creep out. On social media-especially Twitter-several people felt that the cathedral’s burning was “cosmic karma” (in the words of one user) for all the colonization and cultural theft that had taken place over the centuries by European countries; some others also rejoiced that “white people” were being triggered by the church’s burning.
Several people, noticing this small, but vocal trend, wondered why this reaction existed, asking what the burning of a cathedral had to do with cultural appropriation and colonization (construction on Notre Dame began in the 1100s, well before any of the European powers began to colonize outside of their continent) and also why people had to take a tragedy to use it for their own political benefit.
Never miss an opportunity…
The easy answer is that these people are ideologues. Ideology is terribly master because while it gives you a complete circuit of thinking, that circuit is so small that much of the richness of human life is rejected or unrecognized because only what “fits” into the ideology is acceptable. To these people, it doesn’t matter that the church was built before the era of colonization; that, as a church, Notre Dame was an embodiment of the Christian religion, that was, often times, one of the only forces to actually defend the rights of native people and which acted as a moderating influence on the colonizers; one example that stands out is Bartolome de las Casas, a Spanish priest, who defended the Indians against the ideas and attacks of men like Juan Gines de Sepulveda, the Spanish humanist, who argued that the Indians were naturally slaves. It doesn’t matter that the cathedral was an anchor to the past for Western civilization, it’s ideas, faith, purpose and people. All that mattered were the premises of the ideology and those premises demanded that the destruction be celebrated.
But there’s another reason. Notre Dame was a beautiful church. Everyone agreed with that statement; it’s one reason why tourists flocked to it and why the people, even in post-Christian France, regarded the church as the heart of Paris. The problem with that beauty does not exist in a vacuum but is intimately connected to truth. As Dr. Peter Kreeft has explained:
Truth is not defined by consciousness, which conforms to Being in knowing it. Goodness is defined by truth, not by will, which is good only when it conforms to the truth of Being. And beauty is defined by goodness, objectively real goodness, not by subjective desire or pleasure or feeling or imagination, all of which should conform to it.” “Truth is good and beautiful; goodness is true and beautiful; beauty is true and good. But there is an ontological (not temporal) order: it flows from Being to truth, truth to goodness, and goodness to beauty. Truth is judged by Being, goodness by truth, and beauty by goodness.
Since everyone acknowledged that Notre Dame was beautiful, it means that it was only beautiful because it was good and it was only good because it was true. What was true about it? People will have different answers: the specific religion of Catholicism, the general faith of Christianity, the history and culture of the West, the ingenuity of Man and his search for meaning in a world filled with void and chaos, a mixture of all those reasons. Whatever answer one chooses, the fact remains that Notre Dame stood for something real, tangible and solid and true.
That terrifies people because if there is such a thing as objective truth—which the phenomena of beauty gives witness to—logically, we must conform our lives to that truth, whatever it is. To not do so would be to willingly follow a lie, something which no one proudly proclaims on the rooftops. Even when people are not living by a truth, they have to make it seem as if they were because we all understand, consciously or not, that we should live according to the truth. And it is this conformity that terrifies people. It terrifies them because we have deluded ourselves with the idea that freedom means liberation from everything, including the truth. To be truly free, we have told ourselves, we must be able to define everything around us the way we want to define it. And because we have this poor and cannibalistic idea off freedom, we live in fear, not just of anything the embodies truth, but the past in particular. As G. K. Chesterton said:
The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers.
This fear was on full display when President Macron declared in a now deleted tweet that the rebuilt cathedral would be a monument to modern, diverse France; and when Patricio del Real, an architectural historian at Harvard, stated, “The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation.”
When we try to be everything, we end up being nothing. It seems that Notre Dame will suffer the same fate and be the latest victim in this mad dash for “liberation.”
There is a saying I read years ago; where I read it and the author who originated it I’ve forgotten. But the quote in question says: When we are safe at home, we wish we were on an adventure and when we are on an adventure we wish we were safe at home. It captures the human spirit perfectly, or, at least, the spirit that is in most of us. There are and have been rare individuals who never wished that they were safe at home when they were on an adventure, one of these people being Theodore Roosevelt.
Most people, though, are split. To use imagery from J.R.R. Tolkien, most are people are split between the Took side, which wants to go on adventure, and the Baggins side, which wants to stay safe and quiet at home. The Baggins side is very powerful because comfort means safety (at least in our minds, a connection between the two has been made) and if there is one thing that we crave more than anything else, it is safety. We know how crazy the world can be; more than that, we know how terrible the world can be. In the 21st century, an era which people in the Thirties, Forties and Fifties looked forward to as some new Golden Age, free from the weaknesses and troubles of the past, terror can appear while doing something as holy and mundane as going to worship, as Pittsburgh demonstrated to us. Chaos and unpredictability can strike at any time and so we try to stave it off with habits, routines and mantras, fueled by a level of superstition worthy of a medieval peasant.
On second thought, we are less logical than the medieval peasant. He had his superstitions because he believed that there was an invisible world that surrounded the world he could see, a world brimming with witches, elves, spirits, old, forgotten gods, angels and demons. His superstitions then were meant to influence these invisible powers that swarmed around him. Postmodern man has his rituals to forestall the chaos but, with his general disbelief in the supernatural, to what are those rituals directed? Maybe to chaos but, if chaos can be appeased and controlled, it is not really chaos.
Going on an adventure invites the chaos to come to us and swallow us up. Going on an adventure means that we relinquish control and make ourselves subject to the mercy of the forces which we have no hope or chance of controlling. It is a complete surrender which means, to a people who have been conditioned and trained to desire as much control as possible over everything (I include myself in that category), that it is one of the most terrifying things a 21st century person can do.
But adventure is absolutely necessary in life. Years ago, when I was a kid, I saw an old Disney live-action movie starring Rodney McDowell called THE ADVENTURES OF BULLWHIP GRIFFIN and in that movie the Girl says that people are 70% water and if they don’t get stirred up once in awhile they become stagnant. I’ve always thought that that is good imagery for the need of adventure: stagnant water is safe in its bed but it is rancid; nothing can live in it except mosquitos and flies, not the best representatives of the Animal Kingdom. Running water may not know where it is going but it is alive.
As good as that imagery is, I have come to like the image of the Knight Errant, the wondering knight, as the archetype for adventure. Part of the reason is because, earlier this year, I stumbled upon a blog by an Italian author, Giovanni De Feo and one of his blog posts dealt with errancy and the knight errant. In it, De Feo uses the Knights of the Round Table as an example: when the vision of the Holy Grail appears to them, the Knights take it as a sign from God that they are to seek and find it and they immediately leave Camelot for that very reason. But, as De Feo points out, they do not know where they are going. The vision didn’t come with instructions, or a map, or a voice from a burning bush. The Knights have no idea where they are going and none of them know if they will be successful or not (we, the readers and the people familiar with the story, know that only Sir Galahad will actually succeed). And yet they are willing to go on the Quest. They incorporate erranza, the Italian word for errancy and knight errant within themselves.
The beautiful thing about adventure is that you don’t have to look very far for it. Reading fairy tales and fantasy books may make us think that we have to strap on a sword and leave for unchartered lands or take the one step that will put us the farthest from home that we’ve ever been. That may be true in a sense; moving to a new country, a new state, even just a new city can be an adventure because, again, we do not know what will happen to us once we get there, what challenges will await us, what monsters (of every and any variety) we will have to face. But adventure can happen without moving: it can be starting a new relationship, a new job, a new hobby, a new friendship, it can be doing something which you have never done before. It can be as simply as walking out the front door in the morning. Because the real spirit of adventure is openness, an openness to whatever will befall you, good and bad. This is not easy. If I can slip into a personal strand for just one minute—the last two years have not gone according to plan at all, either professionally or personally. But perhaps the way to look at it is an adventure. Perhaps the best spirit to have is erranza, an openness to the good and the bad and the foreknowledge and acceptance that mistakes will be made but that the Quest—whatever it may be—will go on.
With that sense, we will all be errant knights on our Quests.
The urban dictionary says that being fashionably late gives the impression that you’re busy, popular, the man about town, the cool guy who knows that he is cool and knows that everyone else knows it too. While that might be true in some cases, being late (as this blog post is) can have practical sides too since being late gave me the topic for this particular post.
Facebook Memories can be a gift and a curse, depending on what memory is resurrected on a particular day. But this week, it brought back an article I had shared last September 5th, the 25th anniversary of BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES (BTAS). The article, from Hillsdale College Professor of History, Bradley Birzer, is a wonderful love letter not onlt to the show but also to the character of Batman. As Birzer says, BTAS came at a time when the character was beginning to recover from the Sixties and Adam West, due to Tim Burton’s two movies but was still in a limbo of sorts (not helped by the fact that Batman Returns, as Karl Dutton has said, is a good Tim Burton movie but not a good Batman movie) and at a time when children’s television was seen as third tier junk designed mostly to sell toys. And then, Bruce Timm, Paul Dini, Shirley Walker, Kevin Conway, created something special, something that after 26 years still captures the imagination and which is still regarded as the best show of Batman and, for some, the best interpretation of Batman ever.
When BTAS premiered, I wasn’t quite four years old. How I even started watching the show has become a blank; I have a vague memory of my mom asking me if I wanted to watch it and my saying that I would try it, but I’ve thought of that memory so many times over the years that it may be true or just a figment of my imagination. Regardless of how I started watching the show, every day at 4:30, no matter what I had been doing or playing until that point, everything stopped and I would rush to the living room and mom would help me turn on the television and switch to Channel 8 and for the next thirty minutes I would be swept up in Batman’s war on crime.
The show made me a Batman fan. I don’t collect the comics–any comics for that matter–but I collected the wonderful toys and figures that came with the success of the show with which I was able to recreate Gotham in my room and on the stairway landings and it opened me to the DC universe which lead to me discovering new characters, such as Vic Sage (The Question) and Dr. Fate. It was a childhood innocence that still, on occasion, provides me pleasure.
There have been other Batman shows since BTAS. Of these, the best has been BEWARE THE BATMAN which lasted for only one season in 2013, unfortunately. With that one exception, no other show has been able to match the stories, characters, and pathos of the original.
But the core reason why BTAS was a success and is still watched and loved today is because of the representation of Batman himself. I mentioned earlier that when BTAS premiered, the Batman character was not in the best of places, caught as he was between Adam West and Tim Burton. BTAS brought Batman’s pulp roots, his gothic darkness and, more importantly, his virtue to the fore and mixed it so that he was a complete character. More than that, he was a hero.
Like Dr. Birzer says in his piece:
As a western hero—in the line of Aeneas—Batman must seek order in a world of chaos. He must trust to natural law when positive law has gone astray. He must, no matter the cost, protect the innocent from those who would manipulate the things (and persons) of this world for their own gain.
Batman, in BTAS, is not a vigilante, fighting crime to make himself feel better, or because he wishes to avenge the deaths of his parents, twenty years after the fact. He does it so that no one else will experience the loss that he did when a seemingly random act of violence took his parents away from him. He is, in other words, the spirit of vengeance; he knows and sees how the political community of Gotham City fails in its duty to provide not protection so much as Justice to its citizens. Protection is definitely a part of it; with super criminals like the Joker, Mr. Freeze, Bane, Poison Ivy and the Mad Hatter and Two-Face loose on the city, the GCPD would be hard pressed to protect the people, even if it was not corrupt (the few exceptions being Commissioner Gordon, Detective Harvey Bullock and Officer Renee Montoya). But it is Justice that is the Batman’s real mission, the idea, as Aristotle put it, that each man must be given what is due to him. And when the authorities cannot or do not deliver justice as they promised to their citizens, it is Batman’s duty to balance the scales again.
It is against this backdrop that Batman has remained my favorite comic character by far, even on the eve of 30. And I would say, it is the reason why he is still so universally admired, not just here in the United States but around the world. Batman risks his life every night to deliver Justice, when he is under no obligation to do so, and he does it as a regular man, a man whom anyone can become.
The idea that Batman is the hero or character anyone can become is a little contentious today, with fans of other characters, or the usually wet blankets, pointing out that, of course, you can’t really become Batman since Batman had his billions which allowed him to train around the world, build the Batcave and his gadgets and which has helped him live his double life since he can fight crime all not and not have to worry about clocking in for the 9-5 the next day like Spider-Man does. Even last year’s Justice League bought into this: when asked by the Flash what his superpower is, Bruce Wayne answers, “I’m rich.” But that misses the entire point. If being Batman depended on a checking account that ended in nine zeroes, yes, no mere mortal could hope to emulate him. But that isn’t the essence of Batman. The essence of Batman is his iron will in service to the greater good.
How did he become a master of a 120 different fighting skills? Will and discipline.
How did he become a master strategist? Will and discipline.
How did he become the world’s greatest detective? Will and discipline.
How did he transform his body into a fighting machine? Will and discipline.
And for what does he do it all for? Not for money, or fame, or revenge, or power, but to help those who are weak and scared, who live in the twilight of no hope.
And that is beauty of Batman and that is why anyone can become him. Will and discipline are like muscles and will grow and strengthen if we exorcise them. All it requires is a reason to develop these traits and that is where devotion to the common good comes. While we are supposed to stand up for ourselves and improve our lot in life, the greatest things that we do are often times the things that we do for others. There’s a reason why our mothers told us when we were all kids that it’s better to give than to receive, a truth that we discover more the older we get. Having a good and just cause to fight for, principles on which to stand, are what give life it’s meaning. It doesn’t matter if you succeed or not, in a sense; it doesn’t matter how good or how slim the odds are. Batman knows that he will never, definitively win the war on crime. Evil can never be completely defeated so in a sense, evil has already won because it knows that it will still exist after Batman is gone. But, in another and more profound sense, Batman has won from the first because he is willing to fight evil and to act as a symbol of hope and defiance to others who also wish to fight evil.
In that broad but very real sense, we are all called to be Batman.
Two years ago, Colin Kaepernick made the headlines when he knelt for the national anthem before a football game in response, he said, to the objective mistreatment of the black community by policemen. The story made the rounds and the usual suspects made their comments and critiques; I was one of them and inflicted my opinion on the world in the early days of this blog. After the 2016 election, the issue was revisited when President Trump made his views known and the usual people said the usual things about that. And now, with the football preseason upon us once again, the issue is being resurrected as players once again plan to and resume protesting during the singing of the anthem. And this has spread as a legitimate form of protest: a team of 11 and 12 year old football players knelt for the anthem; Haddam, Connecticut town official, Melissa Schlag, divided her small town when she knelt for the pledge; and just recently, Beto O’Rourke, a Congressman from Texas who is running for Ted Cruz’s Senate seat, defended kneeling at a recent town hall rally, by saying that the men who died in WWII and Korea, and the other wars America has fought, fought and died to preserve freedom of speech which includes kneeling for the pledge and anthem in protest.
English writer, Samuel Johnson, once described patriotism as the last refuge of the scoundrel. Seeing that Johnson was an ardent patriot himself–he was vigorously opposed to the American Revolution– I don’t think that he was attacking patriotism. He was making a point that a dishonest person, a scoundrel–a sleaze, as we might say today–will defend his indefensible actions by saying that he was simply being patriotic and that any attack against his actions translates into an attack on his patriotism a la John Kerry in 2004. And that is what is happening here–people are justifying their actions by claiming that it is nothing but a patriotic exercise of their First Amendment rights. The problem is that it is not. In spite of some attempts people have made of defending the kneeling on the grounds that kneeling is a sign of respect and submission, this defense falls short since there is no tradition of kneeling to the American flag. We do not kneel to the flag because the country is not a deity; it is not a monarch, it is not a ruler. It is something much deeper and more profound than that. It is our home. There is a reason why in the past people referred to their country as the Motherland (a few exceptions, like Germany, referred to the country as the Fatherland) and that is because the country, the people, the customs and traditions, language and culture, everything was seen as being interwoven and placed inside of us, giving us a language, a people, a culture, a history–in a sense, an identity. We never choose our country but, in some sense, the country chooses us. More than that, society was seen as being more than just the people who happened to be alive at a particular time but was understood as being composed of the past (the dead), the present (the living), and those not yet alive (the future). In that sense, we belonged to something bigger and grander than ourselves but at the same time more intimate than a monarchy; a spider’s web in its interconnections, or a mother’s embrace, to be more intimate about it.
The kneeling also raises the question: Can the rights that people are claiming to exercise last if the emblem of the institution that protects and defends those rights is disrespected? Why are people protesting the flag? Because they claim that America is inherently racist, so much so in fact that we have never left segregation and Jim Crow behind. What’s more, some argue, they can never be removed. Slavery, as the original sin of America (as some have called it, although slavery did not originate in America, not by a long shot) cannot be washed away. If that’s the case, why should people respect the country and her history and her culture and her people? And if there is no reason to respect those things, can the rights that she acknowledges and protects really be safe? It would be the same thing as saying that the gold bars in the safe will be all right if the house the safe is in is demolished and the safe’s lock broken off.
And this leads to another point, the nature of patriotism itself. I just talked about our country–whichever one she is (for anyone reading not American)–being our mother, our motherland. The word “patriotism” reinforces that idea since it comes, ultimately, from the Greek pateras and the Latin pater, both of which mean “father.” And, just as we are supposed to love our biological father, if for the only reason because he helped to give us life, we are supposed to love our country for the same reason. Patriotism, when you get down to it, is about love; genuine, wholesome love of one’s country, of one’s home. And love is the only way that countries can become great, the only way that they can improve. I’m sure I’ve typed out this line before but, G.K. Chesterton said that men shouldn’t love their countries because their countries are great but that countries become great because men love them. Chesterton gave the example of Rome, which was founded as a dingy, back-water town on the Tiber; it was the love the Romans had for her that made her a great power. As such, even if the grievances of the protesters were true, kneeling to protest would not be the right way to go about solving the problem since disrespect will not change anything, It may make us feel good but it will not change anything.
This might lead to another question: Why is there a lack of patriotism today? One answer might be that we, as a society, have not really had to sacrifice for the country. WWII was the last time the entire country pitched in to achieve a specific goal, whether you were part of the armed forces or not. Children collected scrap metal, women planted victory gardens, men bought war bonds, commodities like meat and gasoline were rationed, new car models were put on hold until after the war. In a word, everyone was part of the war effort and everyone understood that we were all in the effort together. Today, we’ve been at war really since October 7, 2001 when we invaded Afghanistan to eliminate Al-Qeada but you would hardly know it if you just looked at your window. When you’re not called to sacrifice–when you don’t have to sacrifice–you begin to lose appreciation for things. It’s similar to what Dr. Erskine said in Captain America: The First Avenger:
I recently read the short story, “The Man Without a Country,” which was written in 1863 by Edward Everett Hale. Though purportedly a retelling of an actual event, Hale made the whole story up as a way of reviving patriotism, hope and fortitude during the Civil War. It was interesting to see that the protagonist, Philip Nolan, could be a mirror image of a lot of people today: Hale writes that having been born right after the Revolution, Nolan did not have as deep an attachment to the country as the Revolutionary generation did since he had always lived with the United States. He took it for granted. So when he was court martialed for aiding Aaron Burr in his plot, which led to his expression, “Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” and for which he was sentenced to remain under charge of the Navy, scuttled back and forth between voyaging ships and to never set foot on American soil again and to never hear any news about her, Nolan at first laughed. He was not laughing as the years passed by and his ideas and knowledge of the United States remained unchanged. In fact, he became desperate for any scrap of news about home and knowing that he was perpetually cut off from the rest of the crews he sailed with and from the rest of mankind in general because he was the man with no country.
So many people today seem to be people without countries just without realizing it and they do not realize it because what they have has not been taken away from them. But once it is taken away from them–once the rights that they cherish are gone because the country that defended them is gone–then they may realize that
Diogenes befuddles the philosophers with his chicken.
Two weeks ago, the Irish people voted to repeal the 8th Amendment to their Constitution which protected the lives of unborn babies and recognized their right to life. Or, as someone put it much more pithily and much more accurately, the Irish voted for their own genocide.
Even more depressing than the decision itself, was the lopsided result of the vote. The No Campaign (which fought for the preservation of the Amendment) was defeated by a margin of 2-1, with the No Campaign receiving approximately 33% of the vote and the Yes Campaign receiving 66% of the vote. For a country which had amended their constitution in 1983 to prevent the judicial coup that occurred in America in 1973, it was a bitter defeat.
Naturally, there were many people who celebrated the result of the referendum. The New York Times wrote a story which described the vote as a repeal of “one of the world’s more restrictive abortion bans” and that the vote was a slap in the face to “conservative patriarchy” and “Catholic conservatism.” Orla O’Connor, co-director of the Together for Yes group, said that, “This is about women taking their rightful place in Irish society, finally.” Irish PM, Leo Varadkar, said, “The people have spoken. They have said we need a modern constitution for a modern country.” Buzzfeed wrote a glowing article on Aible Smythe, the woman who has fought for abortion in Ireland since the 1970s. According to the Buzzfeed story, the story of Savita Halappanava, the 31 year old dentist who died in 2012 due to complications from a miscarriage, also influenced the Yes vote.
The common theme running through these crows of triumph is that none of these obstacles to which the cheers were directed were true. The 8th Amendment said,
The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.
No mention of religion is made in the amendment and it does not rely upon religion in any way for its support. It is also hard to see how religious tyranny was overthrown—as it was implied it was—which is code for Christianity in general and Catholic Christianity in particular, when Muslims in Ireland voted in overwhelming numbers to retain the 8th Amendment; if history is any judge, Muslims do not care or choose to live under Christian tyrannies and Christians do not choose to live under Muslim tyrannies. But more to the point, such language places abortion exclusively in the realm of religion when such restriction is entirely unjust and illogical. It is also a biological and anthropological issue.
The old saying goes, “If it looks like a duck, moves like a duck, sounds like a duck and acts like a duck, it is probably a duck.” The same holds true for the unborn. The fetus (a word which is Latin for “offspring”) comes from a human male and human female and from the second that it is conceived, has unique, human DNA, human DNA which has never been seen before and will never be seen again. The fetus is as unique as a snowflake, never to be repeated. The fetus is a developing human, yes; children from conception until the time they reach the use of reason, can be said to be developing which is why department stores—to bring in one example—divide clothes between “newborns” “toddlers” “two-year-olds” and the like. It is something which we instinctively understand. The baby developing in his mother’s womb is doing the same thing.
There is also a philosophical issue. In recent years, it has become fashionable in some circles to say that of course the unborn baby is a human being but that it is not a person; all persons are human beings but not all human beings are persons. But as Peter Kreeft argues, many of the arguments that make this claim hinge on the fact that the fetus, or the unborn or the new-born is incapable of X—of reasoning, of appreciating Beethoven, of speaking, of loving, etc. Kreeft says that all these arguments have, as their root, Functionalism, the idea that something is only that thing because of what they do. There is a story that the philosophers of Athens were arguing what it was that made a man and, after much wrangling, the decided on a definition: Man is a featherless biped. At which point Diogenes the Skeptic plucked a chicken and threw it in the midst of the philosophers, telling them that there before them was a man. What the Athenian philosophers had done was mistake the accidentals of Man—his featherlessness, his two-leggedness—and made them essentials, the aspect or quality that makes that thing what it is. The followers of Functionalism do the same thing, saying that the accidentals of persons—like the ability to reason or speak or learn—are the essentials and that without those qualities the person is not really a person at all. But as Kreeft points out, you already have to be a thing that can potentially talk in order to talk because if you weren’t you would never be able to talk in the first place. A new-born only is able to talk later in life because he is already that thing which can talk, namely, a person.
As for Savita Halappanava, it was not a case of a woman being sentenced to death because the doctors refused to give her an abortion. Early in the process of the miscarriage, Halappanava requested an abortion but, because the medical team did not see a threat to her life at the time, declined the request. The team did eventually discover that Halappanava was suffering from a sepsis blood infection and when they realized that her life was in danger, planned to administer misoprostol to induce delivery but the miscarriage was complete before they could execute their plan. The sepsis spread and Halappanava died of cardiac arrest as a result of the infection. It was a tragic case but not one where a woman was sentenced to die because of the 8th Amendment which gave “due regard to the equal right to life of the mother,” but because of a misjudgment of the medical team.
There is another issue that was raised with the referendum, though it did not receive as much attention and that issue was the evolution of laws and morals in a culture. Tim Miller, here at WordPress, reblogged an interesting piece from 2015 in which he argued that laws and norms are in a constant state of flux which strips the mask off the idea of universal norms, at one point saying,
The desperate question from those who believe in some unchangeable universal morality inevitably comes: How do we then know what is right and what is wrong? This, again, is a matter of collective choice. As I say below, it is irrelevant whether there is a “universal morality” which says rape is wrong; the decision of human communities which says it is wrong, is enough. If other communities decide rape or violence are okay, they will eventually be confronted by those who think otherwise, and they might succeed—or for a time they might not. This hazardous situation, in which what is generally held to be good and right is always close to destruction, is just what life in the world is; as custom fills the gap that reason cannot fill, custom at all times is precarious, and must be checked.
The difficulty here is three fold though. First, there are universal morals based not on convention or agreements but on reality. We know instinctively that killing another person just for the hell of it is wrong which is why soldiers must be trained to kill because in war that is their job; we know that lying to save our own hides from our own mistakes is wrong; we know that stealing out of jealousy or envy is wrong. These feelings are rooted deep within us which does not mean that people do not violate these norms and can even train themselves to feel no qualms over killing or stealing or lying—killing their consciences as it were. C.S. Lewis pointed out in his Abolition of Man that societies across history and geography actually had very similar moral principles, even though many of these societies were separated by thousands upon thousands of miles and/or hundreds or thousands of years. We find it fascinating that the Mezo-Americans and the Egyptians both built pyramids (which has given rise to countless bizarre theories) but for some reason, we do not have the same wonder that the same basic universal principals, such as against murder and stealing, are found across human history.
Secondly, these universal norms or morals or truths cannot change because if they did they would not be universal. Miller gives the example of rape, saying that, “it is irrelevant whether there is a ‘universal morality’ which says rape is wrong; the decision of human communities which says it is wrong, is enough. If other communities decide rape or violence are okay, they will eventually be confronted by those who think otherwise, and they might succeed…” but this cannot be the case because this violates the principle of non-contradiction. The principle states that something cannot both be and not be at the same time: a chair cannot be a chair and not a chair at the same time; stealing X cannot both be a good action and a bad action at the same time. Things can only be one or the other. Now, if a culture that held that rape was evil lived alongside a culture that said that rape was not evil, who would be right? The problem gets deeper than that, however. If there are no universal norms but just societal views that can change and evolve, then things like racism and slavery could, legitimately, make a come back since these things are not bad in and of themselves but are only bad because society decided that they were bad. But that means that society could change its mind again and decide that slavery and racism aren’t so bad after all and bring them back. This leads to another dilemma: Ideas can enter or re-enter society only from people. The idea that racism and slavery are all right can only come back through individual people which means that individuals who propose those ideas cannot be faulted for going against societal norms because, again, that is the only way that societal norms can change.
This leads to the third difficulty. The idea that abortion was wrong in the past but is not wrong now can be seen as an example of chronological snobbery which holds that the passing of time changes the morality of certain things. But, if universal norms exist—as I’ve argued above—than the passing of time does not have anything to do with the goodness or badness of certain actions.
Contrary to what some said after the referendum, Ireland did not move forward or into the 21st century two weeks ago. The hope is that Ireland will realize, as C.S. Lewis did that after making a mistake, the most progressive thing to do is to go backwards.
It is not a secret that the state of American education is not just embarrassing, not just terrible but that it is not even education anymore in the real sense of the word. When Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, suggested on Twitter at the beginning of the month, that American society should focus on three year schools and trade schools instead of the traditional four year liberal arts degrees, it makes a certain amount of sense. https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js“>But Kirk went a step further than that; he also said that students should not be forced to take any humanities classes during their college years.
This was a similar note to the one that Senator Rubio played during the 2016 election when he said that America needed more plumbers instead of more philosophers.
To an extent, I understand this point of view. I have never really experienced it; I was very fortunate (dare I say it?—privileged) in that the school where I earned by bachelor’s degree and the one where I earned my master’s degree were actual schools with actual programs, where the professors encouraged debate and who were honest with their students and with themselves. They were schools and programs where I actually graduated, not just with a piece of paper, but with a little more in my head. But I am very much aware that most schools are not like those. Most schools are parodies except that would be an insult to comedy. Schools offer “fat shaming classes” and history classes like the history of surfing. These are stupid but perhaps not harmful. But some classes step out of history all together and can be more accurately described as propaganda. This year at Yale, for example, the History Department is offering a course entitled “Significance of American Slavery” which will discuss, among other topics, “the perpetuation of slavery and other forms of unfree labor in the twenty-first century” even though there is no unfree labor in 21st century America. It’s worth noting that this class is restricted to only freshmen—eighteen year olds, fresh out of high school with no real understanding of the world. Another course offered by Yale this year is titled “The Theory and Practice of Resistance” which will include “antifascism to terrorism; violence to nonviolence, the New Left to Black Lives Matter.” These classes sit side by side with predictable ones such as “Gender and Sexuality in Modern Europe” and “Race, Empire and Atlantic Modernities.”If this were all the schools were doing, that would be bad enough. But these classes are coming at a time when students are drowning in debt; on average, the graduates of 2016 owe $37,172 per student which was a 6% increase from what the graduates of 2015 owed.
Abandoning the humanities, though, is not the solution. It’s not that America, or the world, needs less of the humanities—it is that the humanities have been so corrupted by ideology that they no longer are what they are supposed to be and they do not do what they are supposed to do.
The humanities is a broad umbrella that, according to the Stanford Humanities Center, covers, “the study of how people process and document the human experience.” In other words, they are disciplines, such as history, philosophy, literature, art, music, that study different aspects of society and culture. In our very utilitarian age, we can too easily look at things like literature and art and see them as a waste of time. Knowing about Beethoven’s 9th Symphony will not get us the interview that we need for a particular job; studying the Renaissance masters or Cubism will not get us the raise that we need. But that is taking a too narrow view of the world. I say this not simply as someone who has a master’s degree in History (which could, very easily, make some people think that I’m just defending “my field”) but because areas such as history, philosophy and literature are not just extras that can be added on for extra enjoyment, like sugar in tea but are necessary to be a well-rounded person.
History is necessary in our education for a number of reasons. Many great men have said that history is not only important but vital: John Locke called History “the great Mistress of Prudence, and Civil Knowledge” while David Hume described it as “the greatest mistress of wisdom.” A little closer to home, Benjamin Franklin said that good history “could “fix in the Minds of Youth deep Impressions of the Beauty and Usefulness of Virtue of all kinds [and showed the] Advantages of Liberty, Mischiefs of Licentiousness, Benefits arising from the good laws and a due Execution of Justice.” Now just because great men have issued an opinion on something does not make that opinion automatically correct but it should make us stop and think that if these men understood the importance of history, perhaps we should as well. In this case, they were absolutely right. Santayana said that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. George Orwell, in 1984, showed a possible world where no one remembers the past, a world in which the Party can rewrite the past however and whenever they wish in the Ministry of Truth and thus, control the present and the future. History is a mirror by which we see ourselves since we see the stories that have gone before us and which have led to us—stories of our country, our culture, and, more intimately, our families. Someone who has a better understanding of American history, for example, and the people and events that compose it, will—hopefully—have a better appreciation and love for their country and its uniqueness; a person who knows their family history will be able to see themselves more clearly since they will know from where they came. History also offers pragmatic lessons; officers in training such as at West Point still study the tactics and maneuvers of great generals such as Tuthmosis III of Egypt, Hannibal and Caesar. That leads to another advantage of knowing history; it opens us to the wisdom of the past. If the past is a foreign country, as some have termed it, then the ideas that populate that foreign country are also alien to us, which does not necessarily mean that they are wrong. By opening our minds to these ideas, we can test them and, if true, combine them with our contemporary ideas, thereby creating something truly wonderful.
Philosophy is in just as bad a shape as history. If universities are not whittling or shutting down their Philosophy departments, then they are incorporating the same type of ridiculous classes that History departments are doing; this year at Harvard, for example, PHIL 178—a mid-level course—is about “Inequality” which “will examine some of the main problems thought to be raised by inequality through the lens of several systematic ways of thinking about social justice.” It was classes such as this that Senator Rubio might have had in mind when he made his remarks. But actual philosophy is a useful tool and knowledge to have because it, quite literally, teaches one not what to think but how to think, a skill that is disappearing today. Wrestling with the works and ideas of actual philosophers—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Epicurus, Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, Descartes, Leibnitz, Locke, Hume, Kant, Reid, Kierkegaard, Russell, Wittgenstein—does two things. First, it expands our minds, showing us that there is more to the world than what we can see and touch. Secondly, it forces us to think, to meet these men’s ideas on their own turf and to understand them and judge them by their merits. We not only learn different modes of thinking and analyzing but also how to think and analyze, an ability that would be extremely useful, especially today. To make a pragmatic argument: the political writings of the Founding Period are chock full of political philosophy on diverse topics such as taxation, representation, natural rights, and the construction of empire. If people cannot follow an argument, cannot analyze ideas, those writings from the 1760s and 1770s might as well be written in ancient Persian for all the good it will do them. But if they do not understand the arguments, then the cannot understand the mentality and passion that went into the Revolution and the Founding Era and the period becomes, instead, whatever their teacher tells them. And we have seen how well that has turned out.
Literature is important, first and foremost, because it is beautiful. Good literature is beautiful and Beauty, being one of the three transcendentals, as Peter Kreeft has said, is something which we desire even if we do not know we desire it; furthermore, it is something of which we cannot have enough. Literature can help us do this; a poem like Longfellow’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” or Poe’s “Annabelle Lee,” or a book like Sabatini’s Captain Blood or Pyle’s Men of Iron, can make the drab world a little brighter. But there is a more important reason. G.K. Chesterton once said that children needed fairy tales not so much so that that they would learn that dragons exist but that the dragon will always be slayed. Children need to learn this lesson and adults need to be reminded of this lesson. The world has a habit of turning one cynical and we can start to lose the belief that good and evil exist or, even if they do, that good will defeat evil since there seems to be precious little proof of that in the headlines every morning. But literature, like Dracula or The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, can remind us in the realm of the imagination—a very powerful and valid place—that while evil is powerful and may sometimes have the upper hand, good will triumph but that for that triumph to take place, it requires us to stand against it. As Thomas Jefferson said, “The only thing required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”
The humanities, far from being extras, are necessary, not only because they give us necessary skills or hopes but because they make us well rounded persons. The person who only exercises his arms or the one who only reads comic books (or even just novels) is not a well rounded or balanced person. It’s true the schools are rotten that education in general is rotten but that is not the excuse to dump the humanities. At the very least, we can become our own professors with the help of the Internet and the library. By restoring the humanities to what they are supposed to be, we might be surprised at what we learn.
Norman Rockwell’s Top of the World, courtesy of Ebay.com
It used to be considered fashionable to be late; it demonstrated that one was so important that other attentions had to be given before one could even think of making an appearance at a party or some other social function (it doesn’t seem to have worked in the work setting, unless one was somewhat elevated in the hierarchy). While I would not venture to say that I am important enough use this as an excuse for tardiness, it might still be considered fashionable to be late only because it allows one’s thoughts to mature and, hopefully because of that, to hold a little more than they could.
When Teen Vogue ran its guide to anal sex this past summer, the reactions were already written: people were shocked and rightly outraged that a magazine for teenagers would print such a how to guide while the magazine’s digital editor, Phillip Picardi claimed that the only possible explanation for the backlash was the predictable and boring accusation of “homophobia.” Of course, there was nothing “homophobic” about the reactions of the parents and the commentators who expressed their shock; they were simply flabbergasted that a magazine devoted to teen-age girls would tell its readers how to do something that has been proven to have serious medical consequences.
It is an interesting and ironic twist that the people who often cry the loudest about science really do not care about what science says. They are much like the “cafeteria Catholics” of the Eighties, Nineties and Thousands, picking and choosing which science to cite and believe and which science to ignore. Teen Vogue chose to close their eyes to the myriad risks which anal sex opens. Author Gigi Engle did mention in her guide that contact with feces was inevitable but that this was nothing to worry about, a statement that might have been true if a cornucopia of diseases, such as hepatitis A, B, and C, parasites like Giardia and intestinal amoebas, and bacteria like Shigella, Salmonella, Campylobacter, and E. coli, were not contactable through anal sex. On top of that, the risk of HIV and other STDs such as chlamydia and gonorrhea, syphilis and herpes, increase dramatically from the practice. Added to these threats, there is another layer of danger waiting for someone’s teenage daughter who decides to give “bottoming” a try–fecal incontinence. The chances of contracting anal cancer is also increased. These bacteria, diseases and sicknesses are really not a surprising result from practicing anal sex since, to put it bluntly, things are being put where things should not be put, in this case, the male sex organ being inserted into the manhole of the body’s sewage removal system. One can compare that to the harmony naturally inherent in what Gigi Engle termed ” ‘penis in the vagina’ sex” what used to be known in common circles as simply, sex, the natural harmony found in how the two different sex organs work together so perfectly in their complimentary that Occam’s Razor practically screams that the two were made to go together. The horrible consequences of anal sex are simply the natural results of ignoring ontology and teleology, large, philosophical terms which mean nothing more than “what things are” (ontology) and “what those things are for” (teleology).
If the physical health issues were the only harms done by Engle’s guide, that would be bad enough, but Teen Vogue’s piece does even greater harm than simply the physical. In the first place, the piece can be added to the list of pieces and speeches and actions which erode history and an honest understanding of history. Engle attempted to use history as a defense of anal sex by claiming, “Anal sex, though often stigmatized, is a perfectly natural way to engage in sexual activity. People have been having anal sex since the dawn of humanity. Seriously, it’s been documented back to the ancient Greeks and then some. So if you’re a little worried about trying it or are having trouble understanding the appeal, just know that it isn’t weird or gross.” It should be noted, again, that simply possessing a long pedigree in history does not instantly make X activity moral, or else murder, lying, rape and stealing would also be seen as being “perfectly natural.” The activity has to be taken for what it is, not for how long it has been practiced or how many people have practiced it. It may also be recalled with some amusement that during the oral arguments of the Obergefell case in 2015, the fact that marriage had been seen and understood as a conjugal union of a man and a woman was not deemed sufficient reason to keep reality as it was; rather, it was merely one more barrier which the soldiers of justice had to storm in order that history could be righted. A principle which can be used and discarded at will is not the strongest pillar on which to rest a case. But, even beyond the historical fallacy, Engle’s assertion attempts to change history. It is a fact that anal sex was practiced in the world of the ancient Greeks; there even survives a debate of sorts from that time, in which it was discussed which was more pleasurable, sex with women or sex with boys. But to leave the assertion at that is to play dishonestly. Anal sex, for one, was acceptable to the Greeks only within certain parameters: In Sparta, for example, it was seen as a way for boys to bond and, thus, a way for a brotherhood of sorts to exist between the next generation of soldiers. Once the boys came of marriageable age, however, such activity was not only frowned upon but was punishable by death. Intellectual giants by the names of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle condemned the practice. Casting a wider historical net, behavior of this sort was condemned in ancient Israel; in ancient Rome, though this sort of thing may have been accepted at times with a wink and a nod, it was technically against the law and accusations of some person having or performing anal sex was often used as an attack on one’s enemies, which happened to Emperor Elagabalus. The history is not as clear-cut as Engle would like to have it.
But there is another, and deeper, danger posed to history, not particularly by this particular article, but by the attitude which exudes from its attempt to marshal history in its defense. One of the reasons why History is necessary not just for people but for societies is because History is supposed to act as our teacher. It is true that an answer to a particular, contemporary problem–such as the exact percentage of the federal income tax– will, more than likely, not be found in the Alexiad or in the chronicles of Tacitus or Hume’s History of England, but answers to general questions can be found in its annals. When History is simply used as a battering ram for a particular point or ideology, it ceases to be History but, rather, a monster that we attempt to control in order to sanction our own points and peccadillos and sins. When History is slashed and sewn up into one’s own Frankenstein Monster, we taken to very strange Wonderlands. In the field of American history, to give just one example, a divide has formed between those who see the Founders as Deists to a man and those who see them all as Evangelical Christians neither side making any real attempt to come to a realistic and true account of the matter. But that situation is not surprising; monsters are not strong at dialogue and reasoned arguments but are very good at attempting to crush other monsters and their creators, while the common villagers suffer the most from the battle.
In the second place, Teen Vogue’s guide destroys people and children. There are, again, all of the medical disorders that come from anal sex and which will infect boys and girls–real boys and real girls–which will cling to them and eat at their bodies. More than likely, it will not just end at anal sex; once a particular door is opened, people have a habit of rushing further into the labyrinth, opening more doors and falling further and further into the dark. I remember reading, some years ago, a piece online, the title and author of which I have forgotten but I have not forgotten his story. It concerned a young women in the Seventies who, at the time, was living in a lesbian relationship. As she and her partner were walking through a festival, the woman in question came across two other girls making out; her nonchalance became horror when she discovered that the two girls were actually twin sisters. When she turned to her partner, the partner simply said that they couldn’t say anything; if they wanted society to approve of their behavior, they could not condemn the sexual behavior of others, even if it was composed of incest. Though it happened forty years ago, that story has not expired; as Dr. Robert Oscar Lopez recorded three years ago, the homosexual community was quick to praise a pair of Brazilian brothers and a pair of Czech brothers who declared their sexual love for each other, love that was quickly captured by the camera and which left nothing to the imagination. These doors are opening more quickly than some people may give credit; an eighteen year old girl has declared that after two years of dating, she is going to marry her father after twelve years of estrangement and have children with him and a mother and son were arrested last year for incest. These new arrangements will only lead to more physical and mental problems and, as the doors are opened by real children, they will be the ones to pay the price.
As with History, there is another way in which Engle’s guide destroys real people. Never once does Engle use the words male or female. As Jennifer Hartline commented,
Anatomical parts are mentioned, and the owners of certain parts are given directions pertaining to their parts, such as someone who has a prostate vs. someone who does not. But there’s no mention of men and women. Just nondescript persons with parts.
The world of Engle’s telling is a world without men and women, regardless of the current claim that men and women are simply two of the fifty-seven “genders” from which one can choose, as if choosing what one is were as easy as choosing which brand of milk to buy. In a way, Engle’s world is even more terrifying and cold than the world as it is now since in her mind, it seems that there never anything such as men and women. If there are only organs that can be stimulated so as to give momentary pleasure but no underlying essences to which these organs can cling then, in the words of Andrew Klaven, men and women are merely “meat puppets,” automatons surrounded by other automatons who agree to come together for the sole purpose of exchanging pleasure. Perhaps more terrifyingly, contrary to Miss Hartline, there cannot even be people in this world view since, in this physical world especially, a person can only be composed of matter and form, to use the tried and true Aristotelian language, and matter, especially in the case of people, can only be male or female. If these do not exist, then matter is a lie and if one half of the mystical formula for the creation of a person is a lie, is there really a person? Can there be a person at all?
In the third place, Engle and her guide and Teen Vogue are destroying love and romance. It is apparently a truism that must be repeated or risk being forgotten, that people who are in love want what is best for the beloved, even if that would cause inconvenience and even some discomfort to the lover. But anal sex, as is known causes physical harm; it also causes emotional harm as a 2009 Guttmacher Institute study discovered. It also causes moral harm. Such language is not taken seriously today and yet it is often the case that the most serious things are not taken seriously enough and these are the pillars which people believe they can topple to form a bridge to a new utopia. If not simply the sex organs but men and women themselves are meant for each other in a special way for a special reason, then using that natural instinct and that power for something contrary for its purpose will inevitably cause disaster, even if the participants escape any physical consequences such as, in this case, HIV or cancer; as Emerson once put it, “Commit a crime and the earth is made of glass.” An example can be found in people who live together as though they were married before they actually are married. On the surface, the proposition seems the most logical in world; marriage is such a drastic change in lives that it seems commonsensical to have a “test run” before committing to it. And yet, couples who do so seem more likely to divorce. On an aside, even if this claim is definitely proven to be false (as one study has claimed) it is interesting to note that couples who are married handle stress better than couples who are simply living together. People addicted to pornography have confessed that they became deadened, unable to invest time in their other relationships, even their spousal and familial ones, because of the pornography and yet, at the same time, it was not satisfying them either–the very thing that they craved was unable to fill them. Speech is meant for the communication of the truth and when lies are woven for gain or personal protection against some just action against us, how many times has the lie taken over our lives so that the very thing created to protect us becomes the very thing choking the life from us? Will the consequences of anal sex be different?
Such guides as Engel’s also contribute in the destruction of love and romance by placing exorbitant emphasis on sexual pleasure–by turning it into the summum bonnum of love–that sexual pleasure becomes another monster which destroys love and romance. The reason being is that when sexual pleasure becomes the end all and be all of love and romance then the attainment of that pleasure becomes the only reason for the relationship and the romance to last and a barometer as to the health of the relationship. The spouse, again, becomes merely a means for sexual pleasure, easily replaced if “boredom” sets in. And boredom will and does set in since rather than finding delight in one’s spouse–a person–happiness is made dependent on a temporal and passing state. Not only that, but that temporal and passing state must be gradually increased so that boredom does not set in. This can be seen by a simple experiment: After you stroke your arm with a feather for a few minutes, what used to tickle you now causes no sensation. A variation must be began or more pressure be added to the same space in order for the sensation to start again. It is the same with sex and sexual pleasure; it has been made the “god” of love, the god quickly loses its luster, much as a spoiled child loses interest in his new toys. That is why, two summers ago, Men’s Health, ran a small piece declaring that BDSM a la Fifty Shades of Gray was perfectly normal and desirable. That was not the cry of healthy individuals; that was the sign of the surrender to boredom. The “god” was failing and only an increase in its bacchanalian rites could return it.
And in the fourth place, Engle and Teen Vogue are destroying the very idea of sex itself. It used to be that the word “sex” referred to the sexes, man and woman and not to what they did together, which was considered cosmically awful (in the old meaning of the word, which meant “inspiring awe”), awful because of the power which formed between the man and the woman, the power to make the beloved one’s own in the deepest sense by giving the most intimate part of yourself to the other–half of what was needed for the creation of a new life, a new person, a new story upon the stage of the world, full of his own joys and sorrows, triumphs, disasters, virtues, vices, sins and graces. Shakespeare, in Romeo and Juliet brilliantly captured this power and its awfulness when, at the beginning of Act Three, Juliet says:
Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds,
Towards Phoebus’ lodging: such a wagoner
As Phaethon would whip you to the west,
And bring in cloudy night immediately.
Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,
That runaway’s eyes may wink and Romeo
Leap to these arms, untalk’d of and unseen.
Lovers can see to do their amorous rites
By their own beauties; or, if love be blind,
It best agrees with night. Come, civil night,
Thou sober-suited matron, all in black,
And learn me how to lose a winning match,
Play’d for a pair of stainless maidenhoods:
Hood my unmann’d blood, bating in my cheeks,
With thy black mantle; till strange love, grown bold,
Think true love acted simple modesty.
Come, night; come, Romeo; come, thou day in night;
For thou wilt lie upon the wings of night
Whiter than new snow on a raven’s back.
Come, gentle night, come, loving, black-brow’d night,
Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
By telling teenage girls that sex can include equally what it is meant to be and its contradiction, Engle and Teen Vogue cheapen it to the point of buffoonery. Rather than a leap into the beloved’s arms for the amorous rites that shine with their own light, sex, to the modern sensibilities, can be that or it can equally include acts which will cause pain and emotional distress.
Young girls deserve better than this. Women deserve better than this. People deserve better than this. Rather than a cheap imitation that can corrode the body and the soul, they deserve real, genuine love and real genuine romance. Not the species that often comes to mind when we say the words, covered as they are with harlequin veneers, but the real kind that burns both the lover and the beloved into a union of awful dimensions.
Theatrical poster for Star Wars (1977). Courtesy of fanpop.com
There are some areas where people are not allowed to have a personal opinion, areas which, more often than not, overlap the spheres of the True, the Good and the Beautiful (the Three Transcendentals, as Dr. Peter Kreeft has called them). Murder and rape, for example, regardless of one’s personal opinion are wrong and their innate wrongness cannot be changed one iota. Outside of the Transcendentals and issues of morality and what it means to be truly human, this inability to have a legitimate personal opinion can still possess some force. It is one thing, for example, to say that the 2006 movie Eragon is more personally enjoyed than The Lord of the Rings trilogy; it is another thing entirely to say that Eragon is objectively, of its own nature, better than The Lord of the Rings. Though some legitimate criticism can be laid upon Peter Jackson’s trilogy, there is really no question that he did try to faithfully bring the world which J.R.R. Tolkien discovered into cinema and, as such, many of the themes and symbols which Tolkien incorporated into his mythology present themselves in the films. To give one example: though Tolkien was not fond of allegory, which was one reason why he did not care for C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, symbolism–a sign of a metaphysical reality–was another issue entirely. As such, the personage of Jesus Christ is symbolized three times in The Lord of the Rings: Christ as King is found in Aragorn; Christ as Prophet is found in Gandalf; Christ as Sacrifice is found in Frodo. It is no coincidence, as such, that each character undergoes death and resurrection, most strikingly in the case of Gandalf the Gray who, after he is killed by the Balrog demon, is returned to Middle Earth as Gandalf the White. Jackson’s trilogy caught this and many more symbols and themes found in the books. The books and the movies, therefore, are rightly considered masterpieces. Eragon, in comparison, is a very shallow affair. While it might offer some entertainment on a rainy or lazy day, it does not feed the imagination or the soul as Tolkien’s work does. This does not mean that people should not or cannot enjoy Eragon; there is nothing, so far as I know, nothing morally dubious in the movie or in the first book. A little cotton candy is fun and innocent to have, especially during the county fair; it is when the only thing one eats is cotton candy that a problem can and will develop.
There are other areas, outside these parameters, however, where private opinion can reign supreme. Is Casablanca a better movie than Gone with the Wind? Which possesses a sweeter sound–the flute or the violin? Are the German tunes of Oktoberfest better than the reels played and sung at Irish festivals? Good men may and do and will disagree with each other and drink and laugh while they disagree. The same holds true to the debate over whether Star Trek or Star Wars is the better series and story. Star Trek can appeal more broadly to those who enjoy stricter science fiction a la Asimov and Clark while Star Wars follows the tradition of the space operas, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars. Another and recent addition to this debate came from conservative commentator, Bill Whittle, on his podcast, The Stratosphere Lounge. In answer to a question posed to him, Whittle espoused that, for him, Star Trek was superior to Star Wars because there was the sense of exploration, discovery and adventure that appealed to him as a boy and which has stayed with him throughout his life; Star Wars, on the other hand, never possessed that since none of the characters were exploring anything new. There was the sense that everything that you saw in the galaxy far, far away had been seen a million times before. Whittle, however, continued and added that another defect of Star Wars was that it was hierarchial and aristocratic. His reasoning for this judgement came from the fact that while the Federation and Star Fleet of Star Trek seemed to be a pure meritocracy, in Star Wars, only a privileged few, those who were born with the ability to feel and control the Force, could become the enviable Jedi Knights.
Now, again, there is nothing wrong with Mr. Whittle having his own opinion as to which series or franchise is better. I, myself, would disagree and say that Star Wars is much more enjoyable than Star Trek but, in this case, it is only my opinion and not a matter of Truth, Goodness or Beauty. What is curious, though, is Mr. Whittle’s reasoning for the superiority of Star Trek via his attack on hierarchies and aristocracies. These have become dirty words and dirty concepts in our society today, obsessed as we are with equality. In fact, however, we and our society are not obsessed with equality; we are rabid for egalitarianism. There is a considerable difference between the two. Egalitarianism takes as its starting point that all men are equal, which is, in and of itself true. But the egalitarian does not stop to think how men are equal or what this equality signifies or resides or what follows from these distinctions; rather; the egalitarian follows a straight line of logic by which he comes to the conclusion that since all men are equal, everything about them must be equal as well. As such, the idea is beginning to circulate that even doctors should not tell patients that they are fat and need to become more healthy since that is actually “fat shaming;” this is the reason why schools often give out “participation trophies” to all the children because having a winner and a runner up will damage the well being of the other children. It is the reason for the envy that many people have over the fact that others are wealthier than they.
Contrary to egalitarianism, equality acknowledges that men are equal but only equal in a certain sense. Russell Kirk, when explaining the English idea of equality in his Roots of American Order, wrote that the English system saw all men equal in only two ways: the first was through the recognition of the Imago Dei, the fact that all men, whether king or peasant, are created in the image of God; the second was before the law where every Englishman, whether he was the poorest man of the realm or the king himself was still bound under the sword and scale of the law. This is the idea that was transplanted from the English isle to the American colonies. Thomas Jefferson, one of the most “radical” advocates of equality during the Revolution and Early Republic, wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal;” he did not write that all men are equal and certainly, he did not write that all men are equal in every aspect of their being.
Most of the Founders of the American Republic, in fact, believed strongly in what was then called the “natural aristocracy” of man. One of the best articulations of the natural aristocracy comes from a letter written by John Adams to John Taylor, dated April 15, 1814. Adams began by telling Taylor that, “Few men will deny that there is a natural aristocracy of virtues and talents in every nation and in every party, in every city and village. Inequalities are a part of the natural history of man.” He continued, recalling how, when he had been in Paris as ambassador during the Revolution, he had toured the Hospital of the Foundlings (orphans) and had seen the fifty children in the room under every condition possible. His conclusion was that, “These were all born to equal rights, but to very different fortunes; to very different success and influence in life.” Adams then used strength and beauty to illustrate his point further. Would people say that Hercules or William Wallace were of equal strength as their fellow men? Would anyone deny that some women were more beautiful than others and would not men admit that beauty was more powerful than politics? He asked Taylor:
Is not beauty a privilege granted by nature, according to Plato and to truth, often more influential in society, and even upon laws and government, than stars, garters, crosses, eagles, golden fleeces, or any hereditary titles or other distinctions?
The idea that all men were completely equal in their faculties and their virtues was ludicrous.
We today, though we give lip service to egalitarianism which we have undeservedly honored with the title equality, still recognize the natural aristocracy when we cheer athletes, compare actors and actresses, analyze musicians and singers, or test our own skills with others. Even if we or those we know, such as our children, received “participation awards,” regardless of how we had performed, it is almost certain that we will know, on a some level, that we did not deserve the participation award and that someone else should have been awarded the real prize.
Hierarchies and aristocracies, in this sense, are not pejorative or set against equality or democratic sentiments as they are not dependent on blood or birth. Contrary, in fact, to the false dichotomy Mr. Whittle set up in his analysis of Star Trek and Star Wars, natural aristocracies demand meritocracies for it is only through the sweat of developing our innate talents and gifts that they will actually bloom and be of any real good to us and to our neighbors. This truth remains true, regardless of whether one takes as a hero James Kirk or Luke Skywalker.
British philosopher, Sir Roger Scruton, born in Buslingthorpe, England, has one similarity with Wisconsin born, American actors and director, Orson Welles–both men should not have to wait for death for their names to become household names. Welles, who died in 1985, missed that goal. Hopefully, Sir Roger will have better luck.
Thomas Jefferson said that he would rather have unsure freedom than docile safety. Jefferson, today would be in the minority as most people, in and out of the United States, would rather choose safety then freedom. Part of the reason is that safety is comfortable, something that everyone wants.
It is not a secret that the state of American education is not just embarrassing, not just terrible but that it is not even education anymore in the real sense of the word. When Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, suggested on Twitter at the beginning of the month, that American society should focus on three year schools and trade schools instead of the traditional four year liberal arts degrees, it makes a certain amount of sense. 
The Stonehenge Corner 