Coming to Terms

Month

June 2013

4 posts

Wendell Berry: Jayber Crow: A Novel (Audiobook) → noisetrade.com

nathanschock:

NoiseTrade has a free audiobook from Wendell Berry.

Cool.

Jun 19, 20134 notes
“

To my mind, conservatism is gratitude. Conservatives tend to begin from gratitude for what is good and what works in our society and then strive to build on it, while liberals tend to begin from outrage at what is bad and broken and seek to uproot it.

You need both, because some of what is good about our world is irreplaceable and has to be guarded, while some of what is bad is unacceptable and has to be changed. We should never forget that the people who oppose our various endeavors and argue for another way are well intentioned too, even when they’re wrong, and that they’re not always wrong.

But we can also never forget what moves us to gratitude, and so what we stand for and defend: the extraordinary cultural inheritance we have; the amazing country built for us by others and defended by our best and bravest; America’s unmatched potential for lifting the poor and the weak; the legacy of freedom—of ordered liberty—built up over centuries of hard work.

We value these things not because they are triumphant and invincible but because they are precious and vulnerable, because they weren’t fated to happen, and they’re not certain to survive. They need us—and our gratitude for them should move us to defend them and to build on them.

”
—Yuval Levin’€™s Bradley Prize Remarks | Ethics & Public Policy Center (via ayjay)
Jun 14, 201315 notes
“

Linebarger’s interest in psychological warfare was closely related to his Christian views of ethics and history. Essentially, the purpose of psywar is winning without killing. The goal is to get an opportunity to speak to the mind of the enemy, and convince him that there are other ways to settle differences than killing people.

In Psychological Warfare, Linebarger focuses on the use of propaganda to weaken the resolve of the enemy and persuade him to give up. In his fiction, Linebarger matches the use of words with acts of kindness. This twin approach, “true words and kind actions,” becomes the essence of psychological warfare, both the military kind and the evangelistic kind.

Under the pseudonym Felix Forrest, Linebarger wrote two psychological novels: Ria (1947) and Carola (1949). Ria has been reprinted and is available in hardcover. In this novel we see portrayed something of Linebarger’s understanding of the world between the two great wars. Ria is a young American girl, and she typifies America: young, naive, kind, and rich. She is visiting Europe and encounters several people, who typify (a) the older Christian order in decline, (b) the new European occultism permeating Germany, and (c) the vigorous materialistic atheism of the new orient of Japan. There are many levels in this novel, but the most interesting may be its portrayal of these cultures as they meet and interact with each other.

In 1949, Linebarger’s novel Atomsk was published under the pseudonym Carmichael Smith. Atomsk is a spy thriller, and in it Linebarger openly sets forth his ideal of a Christian warrior. The main character explains early on that in order to defeat an enemy you have to love him. You have to want what is best for him, and if possible get close to him, win his confidence, and persuade him to change his ways. The novel shows the outworking of this Christian principle in international affairs.

”
—Christianity In the Science Fiction of “Cordwainer Smith” by James B. Jordan (Contra Mundum 1992)
Jun 13, 20131 note
#science fiction #literature #Christianity #war
“My process is thinking…thinking…and thinking. If you have a better way, please let me know.” —Hayao Miyazaki (via gmd)
Jun 7, 2013144 notes

May 2013

12 posts

May 31, 201312 notes
Bas bleu: "Who the Meek Are Not" - MARY KARR → alaina.tumblr.com

alaina:

Not the bristle-bearded Igors bent
under burlap sacks, not peasants knee-deep
in the rice paddy muck,
nor the serfs whose quarter-moon sickles
make the wheat fall in waves
they don’t get to eat. My friend the Franciscan
nun says we misread
that word meek in the Bible verse that blesses them.
To understand the meek

May 30, 20135 notes
“

Of all places, the Church should surely be the most realistic. The Church knows how far humanity has fallen, understands the cost of that fall in both the incarnate death of Christ and the inevitable death of every single believer. In the psalms of lament, the Church has a poetic language for giving expression to the deepest longings of a humanity looking to find rest not in this world but the next. In the great liturgies of the Church, death casts a long, creative, cathartic shadow. Our worship should reflect the realities of a life that must face death before experiencing resurrection.

It is therefore an irony of the most perverse kind that churches have become places where Pascalian distraction and a notion of entertainment that eschews the tragic seem to dominate just as comprehensively as they do in the wider world. I am sure that the separation of church buildings from graveyards was not the intentional start of this process, but it certainly helped to lessen the presence of death. The present generation does not have the inconvenience of passing by the graves of loved ones as it gathers for worship. Nowadays, death has all but vanished from the inside of churches as well.

In my own tradition, the historic Scottish Presbyterian tradition, the somber tempos of the psalter, the haunting calls of lament, and the mortal frailty of the unaccompanied human voice helped to connect Sunday worship to the realities of life. There are indeed psalms of joy and triumph. The parents rejoicing in the birth of a child could find words of gratitude to sing to the Lord, but there are also psalms which allow bereaved parents to express their grief and their sorrow in words of praise to their God.

The psalms as the staple of Christian worship, with their elements of lament, confusion, and the intrusion of death into life, have been too often replaced not by songs that capture the same sensibilities—as the many great hymns of the past did so well—but by those that assert triumph over death while never really giving death its due. The tomb is certainly empty; but we are not sure why it would ever have been occupied in the first place.

Only the dead can be resurrected. As the second thief on the cross saw so clearly, Christ’s kingdom is entered through death, not by escape from it. Traditional Protestantism saw this, connecting baptism not to washing so much as to death and resurrection. Protestant liturgies made sure that the law was read each service in order to remind the people that death was the penalty for their sin. Only then, after the law had pronounced the death sentence, would the gospel be read, calling them from their graves to faith and to resurrection life in Christ. The congregants thereby became vicarious participants in the great drama of salvation.

There was surely catharsis in such worship: The congregants left each week having faced the deepest reality of their own destinies. Perhaps it is ironic, but the church that confronts people with the reality of the shortness of life lived under the shadow of death prepares them for resurrection better than the church that goes straight to resurrection triumphalism without that awkward mortality bit.

Bonhoeffer once asked, “Why did it come about that the cinema really is often more interesting, more exciting, more human and gripping than the church?” Why, indeed. Maybe the situation is even worse than I have described; perhaps the churches are even more trivial than the entertainment industry. After all, in popular entertainment one does occasionally find the tragic clearly articulated, as in the movies of a Coppola or a Scorsese.

A church with a less realistic view of life than one can find in a movie theater? For some, that might be an amusing, even entertaining, thought; for me, it is a tragedy.

”
—Carl Trueman, “Tragic Worship” (via wesleyhill)
May 29, 201320 notes
“At some point you have to believe that the inadequacies of the words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them. You have to believe that poetry has some reach into reality itself, or you have to go silent.” —Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss, p. 141 (via recycledsoul)
May 28, 201387 notes
“

May the mind of Christ, my Savior,
Live in me from day to day,
By His love and power controlling
All I do and say.

May the Word of God dwell richly
In my heart from hour to hour,
So that all may see I triumph
Only through His power.

May the peace of God my Father
Rule my life in everything,
That I may be calm to comfort
Sick and sorrowing.

May the love of Jesus fill me
As the waters fill the sea;
Him exalting, self abasing,
This is victory.

May I run the race before me,
Strong and brave to face the foe,
Looking only unto Jesus
As I onward go.

May His beauty rest upon me,
As I seek the lost to win,
And may they forget the channel,
Seeing only Him.

”
—
Words: Kate B. Wil­kin­son, be­fore 1913; ap­peared in Gold­en Bells (Lon­don: Child­ren’s Spe­cial Ser­vice Miss­ion, 1925).
May 25, 2013
#dallas willard
May 18, 20132 notes
#my photo #flowers
May 16, 2013
#my photo
May 15, 2013
#my photo
“Beauty is goodness made manifest to the senses.” —Dallas Willard, a Man from Another ‘Time Zone’ | Christianity Today
May 8, 20134 notes
“

As Dallas taught so many, the Sabbath and Sabbath moments like the ones he described are ways of acknowledging who is in charge of the world and who is not. It reminds us that we are dependent on God and not ourselves. Our activity, our work, our intensity are not god. And by resting from those things, we acknowledge who is.

By giving away money we at once blaspheme the god of Mammon and worship the true God. By giving away time we at once blaspheme the god of Activity and worship the true One.

”
—

IVP - Andy Unedited - Remembering Dallas Willard

RIP, Dallas. I am honored to have known you.

May 8, 20132 notes
“Just what sort of animal is pictured when contemporary philosophy of religion talks about “believers”? Do the believers countenanced in contemporary philosophy of religion ever kneel or sing? Do they ever pray the Rosary? Do they ever respond to an altar call, weeping on their knees? In fact, do believers ever really make an appearance in philosophy of religion? Is it not most often taken up instead with beliefs? Judging from the shape of the conversation in contemporary philosophy of religion, one would guess that “religion” is a feature of brains-in-a-vat, lingering in a particularly spiritual ether but never really bumping into the grittiness of practices and community. Indeed, one wonders whether such “believers” really even need to go through the hassle of getting up on Sunday morning. Once the beliefs are “deposited,” it is hard to see what more is needed to be faithful.” —James K.A. Smith, Epistemology for the Rest of Us, Philosophia Christi, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2008. (via nathanschock)
May 6, 20137 notes
“E.O. Wilson recently complained that the humanities offer an “incomplete” account of culture, ethics and consciousness (and kindly offered to complete the account by removing the humanities from the picture completely). What Wilson sees as a bug is in fact a feature. The humanities are and should be incomplete by design—that is, there should be no technology or methodology which we might imagine as a future possibility that would permit complete knowledge achieved via humane inquiry nor should we ever want such a thing to begin with.” —

More from Timothy Burke.

This whole post is gold, really.

(via giftsoutright)

May 4, 20139 notes
Apr 30, 2013
#my photo

April 2013

5 posts

Apr 29, 20131 note
#my photo
“Liberals are right that the language we use as Christians is not “literally” true; rather, it is figurative, poetic, imaginative language. But the orthodox are right in a more profound way: for the language of imagination – which is to say, biblical language – is the only language we have for thinking and speaking of God, and we receive it as the gift of the Holy Spirit. Theology deceives itself if it conceives of its task as translating the figurative language of scripture and piety into some more nearly literal discourse about God. The theologian’s job is not to tell fellow believers what they really mean; rather, it is to help the church speak more faithfully the language of the Christian imagination. The theologian is not a translator but a grammarian.” —

Richard Bauckham and Trevor Hart, ‘The Shape of Time’ in The Future as God’s Gift: Explorations in Christian Eschatology (ed. David Fergusson and Marcel Sarot; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000), 86.

The theologian as grammarian | Per Crucem ad Lucem (via mshedden)

Apr 29, 201316 notes
“The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a creative mind to spot wrong questions.” —Antony Jay (via thefearsarepapertigers)
Apr 29, 201340 notes
“The purpose of theology - the purpose of any thinking about God - is to make the silences clearer and starker to us, to make the unmeaning - by which I mean those aspects of the divine that will not be reduced to human meanings - more irreducible and more terrible, and thus ultimately more wonderful. This is why art is so often better at theology than theology is.” —Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss, 130. (via invisibleforeigner)
Apr 28, 201357 notes

March 2013

10 posts

Naming the torment

dictionaryofobscuresorrows:

icharos asked: “I think you could make a living creating words to describe such deeply intimate sorrows. It would be like going to a doctor but instead of prescribing medication, you give the torment a name, and suddenly tangled emotions fall neatly into place and with that quiet word, you can breathe.”

Beautiful idea, and my dream job. I think the act of naming something implies, very simply, that you’re not alone. We give names to things so we can talk about them. Once there’s a word for an experience, it feels contained somehow—and the container has a handle, which makes it much easier to pick up and pass around. Kinda comforting.

Mar 30, 2013668 notes
#naming
“I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.” —

Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

(via ssufficiently)

Mar 30, 2013251 notes
#language
“Recognizing idols for what they are does not break their enchantment.” —

W. H. Auden, A Certain World (via garbandier)

A related thought: Your recognition and understanding of a physical or moral law does not exempt you from it.

Mar 27, 20137 notes
Mar 25, 2013360 notes
Logic: A God-Centered Approach → reformedforum.org

nathanschock:

Knowledge of God is not exhaustive. There’s always mystery. The history of logic is partly the history of trying to eliminate mystery. And there’s a sense in which I want to dig and understand God and his world more and more fully, right? I don’t want to just say ‘well everything is a mystery’ and just throw my hands up at the beginning. But, I think much of the history of logic, and really western rationality, is the idea that if we could just penetrate enough, we could eliminate mystery and it’s not true. It’s not true even in the area of the most formalized logic. In fact, mystery increases with knowledge because there’s always more questions that are opened at the far end of knowledge.

A very interesting interview on one of my favorite podcasts. I’m also glad to see that Dr. Polythress made a section of his book on logic and several other ebooks available for free download. More reading to do.

Grateful for the ebook links.

Mar 23, 20135 notes
“Power gradually extirpates from the mind every humane and gentle virtue.” —Edmund Burke
Mar 23, 20134 notes
“To speak of God’s goodness as nightmarish is not to indulge in wanton and idle use of paradox. On the contrary, it is an effort to overcome the mistake of regarding the grace and mercy of God as something always cheering and comforting.” —Ralph C. Wood, Chesterton: The Nightmare Goodness of God, 6. (via invisibleforeigner)
Mar 12, 201313 notes
“It is not that, as an intellectual, one can or should seek to subordinate everybody else’s knowledge to one’s own grand purposes. Even G. W. F. Hegel arrived too late to do that, and no one has tried since. What is called for, paradoxically, is less a store of knowledge than a “store” of ignorance. By forcing oneself to go where one is oneself the blinking beginner rather than the seasoned expert, one learns to turn one’s own narrow intellectual sophistication into a broadened version of itself. A generalist is someone with a keener-than-average awareness of how much there is to be ignorant about. In this way, generalization as a style of writing is decidedly different from mere simplification or popularization. If a specialist is someone who knows more and more about less and less, a generalist is unapologetically someone who knows less and less about more and more. Both forms of knowledge are genuine and legitimate. Someone who acquires a great deal of knowledge about one field grows in knowledge, but so does someone who acquires a little knowledge about many fields. Knowing more and more about less and less tends to breed confidence. Knowing less and less about more and more tends to breed humility. Popularization, which certainly has its place, conveys the specialist’s confidence but also his or her isolation. Generalization conveys the generalist’s diffidence but also his or her connectedness and openness to further connections. Something like this, to repeat, is the core difference between the academic and the intellectual in action on the page.” —Jack Miles (HT: Alan)
Mar 7, 201315 notes
Mar 5, 201345 notes
“Again, while it is a great blessing that a man no longer has to be rich in order to enjoy the masterpieces of the past, for paperbacks, first-rate color reproductions, and stereo-phonograph records have made them available to all but the very poor, this ease of access, if misused — and we do misuse it — can become a curse. We are all of us tempted to read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music than we can possibly absorb, and the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind than yesterday’s newspaper.” —W. H. Auden, Secondary Worlds (1967).  (via ayjay)
Mar 3, 2013575 notes

February 2013

12 posts

“In art … we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we are asked to endure.” —Madeleine L’Engle (via Mako Fujimura on FB)
Feb 26, 20132 notes
“

I am one of those who believe that a human being is not an autonomous construction with no given structure, order, status, or role. I believe that the affirmation of freedom does not imply the negation of limits and that the affirmation of equality does not imply the leveling of differences. I believe that the powers of technology and of the imagination do not require that we forget that being is a gift, that life is prior to all of us, and that it has its own laws.

I long for a society in which modernity would have its full place but without implying the denial of elementary principles of human and familial ecology; for a society in which the diversity of ways of being, of living, and of desiring is accepted as fortunate, without allowing this diversity to be diluted in the reduction to the lowest common denominator, which effaces all differentiation; for a society in which, despite the technological deployment of virtual realities and the free play of critical intelligence, the simplest words—father, mother, spouse, parents—retain their meaning, at once symbolic and embodied; for a society in which children are welcomed and find their place, their whole place, without becoming objects that must be possessed at all costs, or pawns in a power struggle.

”
—Gilles Bernheim, Chief Rabbi of France (via freyatlast)
Feb 23, 201315 notes
“Yet one important biblical response to suffering did not find a place among Luther’s heirs: lament. The psalms, in particular, contain illustration after illustration of God’s faithful people calling God to account because their suffering defied not just explanation but indeed God’s covenantal promises. This tradition did not find a place in a “premodern consolation literature” that consistently advised men and women to “accept their suffering patiently and make no protest against the workings of divine providence.” Rittgers intriguingly suggests that this loss of lament may have had profound consequences, among them contributing to the “gradual disenchantment of the world …. Perhaps in the (very) long run, the insistence of the Western churches that human beings must face suffering without the possibility of lament has worked to undermine the plausibility of Christian faith.” —In Praise of Lament | Books and Culture
Feb 23, 20133 notes
“One of the amazing things about the human being is that it is capable of restoration, and indeed of a restoration that makes it somehow more magnificent because it has been ruined. This is a hopeful but strange thought.” —Dallas Willard in Renovation of the Heart (via calebmurphree)
Feb 18, 20135 notes
“I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.” —C.S. Lewis: Intro to Screwtape Letters
Feb 18, 201322 notes
“We live in an ideological time that proudly assures us that no answers can be given, that there is only power and exploitation and contingency. No proposition is more questionable or less questioned than this. But it is not true that there are no answers. What is true is that there are many answers we are not prepared to recognize because we have not formulated the proper questions. What is true, and consequently ominous, is that we can choose not to question because we do not want to hear the answer. We do not want to change our lives. And as Plato said, a lie in the soul is the worst of evils.” —James V. Schall, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs (via garbandier)
Feb 17, 201316 notes
“There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection. One of the latter sort comes at length to know at once whether a thing is true the moment it comes before him; one of the former class grows more and more afraid of being taken in, so afraid of it that he takes himself in altogether, and comes at length to believe in nothing but his dinner: to be sure of a thing with him is to have it between his teeth.” —George MacDonald, The Princess and Curdie
Feb 12, 201310 notes
“

Writers talk a lot about epiphanies—what O’Connor, in her Catholic tradition, called “grace”—in short stories. But I think we’re tyrannized by a misunderstanding of Joyce’s notion of the epiphany. That stories should toodle on their little track toward a moment where the characters understand something they didn’t understand before—and, at that moment, they’re transformed into better people.

You know: Suddenly Billy understood that his grandmother had always gone through a lot of difficult things, and he resolved he would never treat her that way again.

This kind of conversion notion is based on a very comforting idea—that if only we had sufficient information, we wouldn’t act badly. And that’s one of the great things about what The Misfit tells the Grandmother in the line I like so much. He’s not saying that a near-death experience would have turned her into a good woman. He’s saying it would take somebody threatening to shoot her every minute of her life.

In other words, these conversion experiences don’t stick—or they don’t stick for very long. Human beings have to be re-educated over and over and over again as we swim upstream against our own irrationalities.

(There’s a great line in Orson Welles’ film Citizen Kane, where one of the protagonist’s enemies says to him: “You’re going to need more than one lesson, Mr. Kane, and you’re going to get more than one lesson.”)

Now, O’Connor really believes that we can flood, momentarily, with the kind of grace that epiphany is supposed to represent. But I think she also believes that we’re essentially sinners. She’s saying: Don’t think for a moment that because you’ve had a brief instant of illumination, and you suddenly see yourself with clarity, that you’re not going to transgress two days down the road.

”
—Joe Fassler, “What Flannery O’Connor Got Right: Epiphanies Aren’t Permanent” (via Alaina)
Feb 9, 201314 notes
“Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness.” —Pearl S. Buck (via notyourgramma)
Feb 9, 20132,497 notes
“I would like to see a cognitive-evolutionary explanation of the desire for explanations. That cultural and artistic phenomena are susceptible to being causally accounted for is the one belief that seems to go unquestioned and unexplored by our evolutionarily informed critics.” —Alan Jacobs (via garbandier)
Feb 6, 20136 notes
Gifts Outright: On Your Heart → giftsoutright.tumblr.com

giftsoutright:

“‘You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might. And these words which I command you today shall be on your heart’ (Deuteronomy 6:5-6).


“On your heart. Why on and not in, asks the Kotzker Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendl of Kotzk (1787-1859). Because…

Feb 5, 20134 notes
“When you see people fall into various sins against you, against the Lord, against their neighbors and against themselves, do not be angry with them – for there is much malice and anger in the world without yours – but pity them from all your heart and soul and excuse them when they offend you saying, ‘Father, forgive them, for sin perplexes them, and they know not what they do’.” —St. John of Krondstadt (via Frederica M-G on FB)
Feb 1, 201310 notes

January 2013

16 posts

“It’s popular today to say that beauty is arbitrary, but nobody who’s really in the grip of beholding beauty thinks so, any more than anybody who’s confronted with truth really thinks that truth is arbitrary. The difference is this: when we’re confronted with truth, the most obvious thing about it is that we can’t change it by our will, though we might want to. But when we’re confronted by beauty, the most obvious thing about it is that we wouldn’t want to change it. Truth, if it is acknowledged, can correct us by showing us the errors of our will; we have not willed rightly. But beauty, if it is acknowledged, can correct us by showing us the errors of our love; we have not loved rightly, or enough.” —from something [bluedollar] wrote five years ago, apparently. (via bluedollar)
Jan 31, 20139 notes
“It is not our task to tell people what they want to hear; we must tell them what in some sad future time they would wish they had heard.” —Lancelot Andrewes (adapted from a sermon)
Jan 30, 201313 notes
“

I don’t have an answer to the problem of evil. But if Job was answered by the presence of God, then the only thing we can offer is to be the presence of God in someone’s life. The quiet, loving friend, the tender mother, the faithful wife. It doesn’t solve the insoluble, and it won’t make anyone applaud you for being right or winning a war. Nobody becomes president of a seminary or makes the best-seller list by holding the hand of someone in pain.

But it says that God is good. Here, here is goodness: baked and covered in this casserole dish, shining in this stack of clean laundry, ringing in that phone when you’re lonely. God is good, my letter says, even if the words aren’t printed on it. God is good, I hear in that familiar joke from a much-missed friend, who suddenly stopped by. Not watch me win, but God is good.

”
—Sharon L. Holland: More than being right
Jan 30, 20135 notes
#key
“I will trust Him. Whatever, wherever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him; in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him; if I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. My sickness, or perplexity, or sorrow may be necessary causes of some great end, which is quite beyond us. He does nothing in vain.” —John Henry Newman (via loveunfailing)
Jan 28, 201325 notes
“The well-intentioned mothers who don’t want their children polluted by fairy tales would not only deny them their childhood, with its high creativity, but they would have them conform to the secular world, with its dirty devices. The world of fairy tale, high fantasy, myth, is inimical to the secular world, and in total opposition to it, for it is interested not in limited laboratory proofs, but in truth.” —Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water, 54 (via settledthingsstrange)
Jan 26, 201368 notes
“The vital necessity for tradition consists in the fact, as the old aphorism goes, that mankind has greater need of being reminded than of being instructed. Human existence can come to grief not only because people neglect further learning, but also because people forget and lose something indispensable.” —Josef Pieper, Tradition: Concept and Claim, 22 (via settledthingsstrange)
Jan 26, 201331 notes
Losing civilization

I read a good bit of speculative fiction—though less than before the kids were born, for some reason. One subgenre that I didn’t really appreciate until recently was the post-apocalyptic. Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun is a case in point, as is the lighter tone of Christopher Stasheff’s Escape Velocity. It wouldn’t be a stretch to include The Lord of the Rings.

At the moment I am reading Jeffrey Overstreet’s Auralia Thread  series, which seems to have a similar background feel.

Part of the conceit of such novels is a new civilization building (or surviving) on the ruins of an older and often greater civilization, whether more technologically advanced, more courageous, more entrepreneurial, or more free. The new culture cannot fix what breaks, and it falls into despotism or another more primitive form of society, often accompanied by something like a new monasticism or system of guilds.

I have generally enjoyed, though not usually sought out, books with such themes, but never fully felt the possibility of regressing for myself. This may be because of the modernist atmosphere in which I grew up. Conservative Christianity in the 1980s was anything but doubting (on the surface, at least) of the virtues and eventual triumph of biblically based American representative democracy and the American can-do spirit. There’s much to value in that flavor of Christianity and in American-style democracy. But neither are much help in inculcating a wider or longer-term perspective.

I’m now in middle age, it would appear, and the possibility of watching one’s civilization abandon itself does not feel so remote. One begins to see why the Greeks believed that history is cyclical, since so many elites make the same mistakes over and over again—made worse by increased technological efficiency.

Even after the blatant lessons of the twentieth century, people are unwilling to admit that humanity is fallen, or even tragically flawed. And we are often reluctant to do the hard work of confronting encroaching despotism or the somewhat easier work of naming demagogues. Malaise is hard to resist without a competing hope to live into, a better story to tell.

Our overlord elites are unwilling to admit that they are not omnicompetent. Results and consequences are irrelevant to the pursuits of their dream of technocratic control (I commented to my wife yesterday that we have the circuses, but are missing the bread). They judge themselves on their intentions and their opponents on their adherence to the dogmata of the moment; all those school assignments of 1984 and Animal Farm seem to be backfiring as former students turn professor and use them as instruction manuals for a new generation of banal oppression.

Should the elites finally fail us or drive us to barbarism or despotism, the Internet or the remainders of printed books may help us maintain much of our technology (that’s good, isn’t it?), but I suspect the Internet will be of little use at the level of virtue and maintaining those near-inexpressible patterns of thought, habits of mind, and qualities of character that most truly define a civilization. Much of value will be lost.

The positive side of the equation is that such fiction (and so many cases from history, too) offers a vision for recovered civilization and thus encouragement for the small groups of thoughtful and faithful people who will survive, and perhaps even flourish, in a decayed society, until the conditions are made right for rebuilding.

Such writings are also of value in shaping our expectations; American civilization, Western civilization, though better than most alternatives on offer, is not salvation. We still desire a better country.

Jan 25, 20131 note
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