Activism and Quietism – Page 3 – Maverick Philosopher

A Monk and His Political Silence

Mary Gordon, On Thomas Merton (Boulder: Shambala, 2018, 118):

By the late fifties Merton was deeply disturbed about his political silence.

Should he have been? This world is a passing scene. The temporal order is next to nothing compared to eternity. That is the old-time Roman Catholic teaching that justifies the world-flight of monks and nuns. From The Seven Storey Mountain we know that Merton understood and deeply felt the contemptus mundi enjoined by the monastic tradition. His sense of the vanity and indeed nullity of the life lived by the worldly, and the super-eminent reality of the "Unseen Order," a phrase I borrow from William James, is what drove Merton to renounce the world and enter the monastic enclosure. Despite his increasing critical distance from the enthusiasms and exaggerations of the book that brought him instant fame, he never lost his faith in the reality of the Unseen Order. He never became a full-on secularist pace David D. Cooper, Thomas Merton's Art of Denial: The Evolution of a Radical Humanist, University of Georgia Press, 1989, 2008. Although Cooper is wrong in his main thesis, his book is essential reading for Merton enthusiasts.

To repeat, the conflicted monk never lost faith in the Unseen Order. But the reality of said Order is not like that of a ham sandwich. To the world-bound natural man, the 'reality' of such a sensible item cannot be doubted despite its unreality and insignificance under the aspect of eternity. But the Reality of the Unseen Order can. It is given to those to whom it is given fitfully and by intimations and glimpses. Their intensity does not compensate for their rarity. They are easily doubted. The monastic disciplines are insufficient to bring them on. Meanwhile the clamorous world won't shut up, and the world of the 'sixties was clamorous indeed. The world's noisy messages and suggestions are unrelenting. No surprise, then, that Merton wobbled and wavered. Cooper describes him as a failed mystic (Chapter 6) who never reached infused contemplation. I agree with that. This is why it is foolishly hyperbolic when his fans describe him as a 'spiritual master.' But I don't agree with Cooper that Merton resolved his conflict by becoming a radical humanist. He remained conflicted.

Merton came to realize that the monkish ideal of a life of infused or passive or mystical contemplation was unattainable by him. That, together with his literary ambition and his need for name and fame, threw him back toward the world and drove the doubts that made him disturbed over his political silence.

It's a hard nut to crack. If you really believe in God and soul, then why are you not a monk? And if you are not, do you really believe in God and the soul?

I enjoyed Mary Gordon's book very much and will be returning to it. The lovely feminine virtue of sympathetic understanding is on full display.

Wolff on Anti-Natalism: A Glimpse into the Mind of a Leftist Activist

In an entry bearing the charming title WTF? Robert Paul Wolff expresses astonishment at his commenters' discussion of anti-natalism:

I have to confess that blogging is weird. It has its pleasures, but from time to time the conversation here takes a genuinely strange turn. Anti-natalism? Seriously? With all the challenges that face us, with the disaster that is American politics, with the signs, at long last, of a grassroots progressive surge, we are talking about anti-natalism?

Look, far be it from me to stifle discussion. When you are done, I will go on talking about the world.

From this outburst one can see that for the leftist activist, the political is everything. One is not talking about the world if one is talking about the value of life and the morality of procreation. For the Stoned Philosopher, questions about life and death, meaning and value, God and the soul, pale into insignificance in comparison to the political squabbles of the day.

Our sane, conservative appreciation that the political is a limited sphere leaves us at a political disadvantage over against leftists for whom the political is the only sphere.

I call this The Conservative Disadvantage.

The Unavoidability of the Political

Skholiast at Speculum Criticum sends a friendly greeting that I have shortened a bit:

Like the recent correspondent you quote in your Christmas post, I've been reading you a long time — I guess ten years now — and I read you from across the political divide. Possibly I am further "left," or "radical," or whatever, than that reader — I know I don't think of myself as "liberal," anyway. But when my liberal acquaintances get irritated with me, it's as likely to be because I've cited Burke, or Robert George, as Marx or Cornell West . . .

I'm closer to apolitical (duly acknowledging the dangers and possible incoherence of such a stance). Sure, you and I would have plenty to argue about — and we would argue because the differences matter — but I like to think we'd walk away still respectful, if shaking our heads. . . . Still, I read you for a lot more than curmudgeonly politics. It's for your critiques of scientism, your sane openness to mystery (does the [desert] landscape reinforce that?), and above all your study-everything-join-nothing stance, which has always resonated with me.

I share your love of — and I think your reasons for loving — Kerouac. And there's no other blogger from whom I'm more likely to learn a new name to track down. (For a long time, you were the only philosophy blogger I'd ever read who had cited [Erich] Pry[z]wara.)

You are right (I am afraid) that 2018 will bring more acrimony, not less, to politics . . . . My real concern is simply that philosophy itself remain possible (though *arguably* philosophy must seek justice & so must remain politically — & socially — "engaged," this is not obvious). Some regimes, and some social climates, are better than others for the possibility of philosophy. I am fairly persuaded that the acrimony doesn't help, but who knows? Perhaps philosophy is threatened more, in a different sense, when it is easier for it to fly under the radar w/o giving "offense." In any case I hope that real thinkers will always be able to recognize each other.

My concern too is that "philosophy itself remain possible." I would prefer to let the world and its violent nonsense go to hell while cultivating my garden in peace. Unfortunately, my garden and stoa are in the world and exposed to its threats. My concern, of course, is not just with my petty life, but with the noble tradition of which I am privileged to be a part, adding a footnote here and there, doing my small bit in transmitting our culture. In the great words of Goethe:

Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast,
erwirb es, um es zu besitzen!

What from your fathers you received as heir,

Acquire if you would possess it. (Faust, Part I, Night, lines 684-685, tr. W. Kaufmann)

The idea is that what one has been lucky enough to inherit, one must actively appropriate, i.e., make one's own by hard work, if one is really to possess it. The German infinitive erwerben has not merely the meaning of 'earn' or 'acquire' but also the meaning of aneignen, appropriate, make one's own.

Unfortunately the schools and universities of today have become leftist seminaries more devoted to the eradication of the high culture of the West than its transmission and dissemination. These leftist seed beds have become hot houses of political correctness.

The two main threats, as I have explained many times, are from the Left and from Islam. They work in synergy, whether wittingly or unwittingly.

So politics, which has too little to do with truth and too much to do with power, cannot be ignored. This world is not ultimately real, but it is no illusion either, pace some sophists of the New Age, and so some battling within it, ideological or otherwise, cannot be avoided. But philosophy is not battling, nor is it ideology. There is no place in philosophy for polemics, though polemics has its place.

There will be plenty in the year to come.

What is to be Done?

Here:

So, again, the question remains what should conservatives do in the current situation, in the middle of an all-out attempt by powerful elements in the administrative state-cultural leviathan axis to nullify the 2016 Presidential election?

Remain aloof, cultivate one’s own garden of the little platoons in quietist, and often, ironic fashion; talk mostly of civility and temperament; write carefully tailored “moral equivalence” essays faulting both Trump and his critics in equal measure on issues of the day, such as the NFL national anthem or historical statues controversies; work like some center-right commentators with liberals to form a new political alignment, a “New Center”—or go on the offensive against the progressive left and renew the fighting faith of the founders of modern conservatism and their spiritual heirs: Frank Meyer; Willmoore Kendall; Jim Burnham; Bill Buckley in the first decades of National Review; Harry Jaffa and his students; and Publius Decius Mus?

I say go on the offensive.

Minervic flights and the consolations of philosophy cannot be enjoyed when the barbarians are at the gates of one's stoa.

Conservatives, especially those of them given to contemplative pursuits, need to make their peace with activism in order to secure and defend the spaces of their quietism. And this with blood and iron if need be.

The owl of Minerva is a tough old bird, but no phoenix capable of rising from its ashes.

When the world and its hopelessness are too much with us, one can and must beat a retreat into the private life. Body culture, mind culture, hobbies, family life, the various escapes (which are not necessarily escapes from reality) into chess, fiction, religion, meditation, history, pure mathematics and science, one's own biography and the pleasant particulars of one's past, music, gardening, homemaking . . . .

I pity the poor activist for whom the real is exhausted by the political. But I detest these totalitarians as well since they seek to elide the boundary between the private and the public.

So we need to battle the bastards in the very sphere they think exhausts the real. But it is and must be a part-time fight, lest we become like them. Most of life for us conservatives must be given over to the enjoyment and appreciation, in private, of the apolitical: nature, for example, and nature's God.

A Blogger’s Lament

This from a fellow blogger:

My output is down lately. I'm finding it harder not to just look away from it all. There are good books to read, history to study, music and chess to play, hikes to take, questions to ponder, family to love, drinks to drink and food to eat, and so much more. Watching my nation and civilization rot and fester just isn't so much fun anymore.

That said, it's also hard not to be terribly angry about it all, and of course I do have things to say about it. So this is probably just a weary spell that will pass.

What times we live in!

Why follow the disturbing events of the day, thereby jeopardizing one's peace of mind, when one can do little about them? Tranquillity of mind and the news don't go well together. Withdrawal and retreat remain options to consider. But on the other side of the question:

The temptation to retreat into one's private life is very strong. But if you give in and let the Left have free rein you may wake up one day with no private life left. Not that 'news fasts' from time to time are not a good idea. We should all consume less media dreck. But there is no final retreat from totalitarians. They won't allow it. At some point one has to stand and fight in defense, not only of the individual and the family, but also of the mediating structures of civil society, that precious buffer zone between the individual and familial and Leviathan.

A Glimpse into the Mind of a Leftist Activist

In an entry bearing the charming title WTF? Robert Paul Wolff expresses astonishment at his commenters' discussion of anti-natalism:

I have to confess that blogging is weird. It has its pleasures, but from time to time the conversation here takes a genuinely strange turn. Anti-natalism? Seriously? With all the challenges that face us, with the disaster that is American politics, with the signs, at long last, of a grassroots progressive surge, we are talking about anti-natalism?

Look, far be it from me to stifle discussion. When you are done, I will go on talking about the world.

Our appreciation that the political is a limited sphere leaves us at a political disadvantage over against leftists for whom the political is the only sphere.

Of E-Mail, Doing Nothing, and a Life Worth Living

I do appreciate e-mail, and I consider it rude not to respond; but lack of time and energy in synergy with congenital inefficiency conspire to make it difficult for me to answer everything. I am also temperamentally disinclined to acquiesce in mindless American hyperkineticism, in accordance with the Italian saying:

Dolce Far Niente

Sweet To Do Nothing

which saying, were it not for the inefficiency lately mentioned, would have been by now inscribed above my stoa. My paternal grandfather had it emblazoned on his pergola, and more 'nothing' transpires on my stoa than ever did beneath his pergola.

So time each day must be devoted to 'doing nothing': meditating, traipsing around in the local mountains, contemplating sunrises and moonsets, sunsets and moonrises, and taking naps, naps punctuated on one end by bed-reading and on the other by yet more coffee-drinking. Without a sizable admixture of such 'nothing' I cannot see how a life would be worth living.

And that explains why I arise at 2:00 AM. The morning is a most excellent time to do nothing, and so a huge quantity of morning must be allotted to this 'activity.' All practitioners agree that meditation goes best in the morning. It is also the best time to put into practice Thoreau's admonition to "Read not The Times, but the Eternities." As for traipsing around in the local mountains, you want to be on the trail before sunrise to greet its arrival as it kisses with golden light the peaks and spires, and to avoid the varmints of the two-legged kind whose palaver and very presence often prove an annoyance and a distraction.

Dolce far Niente

It is sweet to do nothing, but only if if the inactivity comes like the caesura in a line of poetry or the punctuation in a sentence of prose or the rest in a piece of music. Inactivity extended stultifies. At least this is true here below. Genesis 3:19 may be read as 'sentencing' us to activity. Enduring contemplative repose comes later.

Or does the 'sentence' end with a 'full stop'?

What Exactly is Trumpism?

Another excellent column by VDH. Excerpt:

Trump admires people who make money. He doesn’t buy that those, to take one example, with Ph.D.s and academic titles could have made money if only they had wished—but for lots of reasons (most of them supposedly noble) chose not to. For Trump, credentialed academic expertise in anything is in no way comparable to achievement in the jungle of business.

Instead, in Trump’s dog-eat-dog world, only a few bruisers make it to the top and the real, big money — the ultimate barometer of competence. He sees the “winners” as knights to be enlisted in behalf of the weaker others. He might not quite say that a Greek professor [a professor of Greek] is inherently useless, and he might not worry much about preserving the ancient strands of Western civilization. But he might remind us that such pursuits are esoteric and depend on stronger, more cunning and instinctual sorts, whose success alone can pay for such indulgences. Without Greek professors, the world can still find shelter and fuel; without builders and drillers, there can be no Greek professors. Brain surgery and guided missiles both require lots of money without which decline is inevitable.

……………………

There is an important truth here. The life of the mind is a noble and magnificent thing, and philosophy is the noblest pursuit of them all. The vita contemplativa is an end in itself and the vita activa its handmaiden.

But the spaces of serenity and contemplative repose must be secured by "cunning and instinctual sorts," the rude men who enforce the law and defend us from the barbarians within and the warriors who defend us from the barbarians without. And none of this is possible without the "builders and the drillers."

We intellectuals have a certain amount of justified contempt for the businessmen who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. We are disgusted by the vulgarity, ostentation, and ignorance of types like Trump. And they return the 'compliment.' The truth is that we need each other's virtues.

We need a man like Trump in the White House now after the disasters both foreign and domestic perpetrated by an adjunct law professor and community organizer with no experience of the real world whose only credentials are a gift of gab and a dark skin pigmentation.

The Altar of Activism

Don't sacrifice your happiness on the altar of activism. Although happiness involves activity as Aristotle observed, it also involves rest, appreciation, enjoyment, gratitude, contentment, and contemplation. These, especially the last five, are deeply conservative. And they lie beyond the political.

We conservatives should be politically active only to the extent that it is necessary to beat back the totalitarians for whom the political is all.

A Time to Act and Press Our Advantage

Minervic flights and the consolations of philosophy cannot be enjoyed when the barbarians are at the gates of one's stoa.

The owl of Minerva is a tough old bird, but no phoenix capable of rising from its ashes.

Political Action and the Principle of Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien

Attributed to Voltaire. "The best is the enemy of the good." The idea is that one should not allow the pursuit of an unattainable perfection to impede progress toward an attainable goal which, while not perfect, is better than the outcome that is likely to result if one seeks the unattainable.

Here is another formulation, not as accurate, but pithier and replete with trademark MavPhil alliteration: Permit not the pursuit of the perfect to preempt the possible.

Meditation on this truth may help conservatives contain their revulsion at their lousy choices. Barack Obama, who has proven to be a disaster for the country and for the world, was elected in 2008 in part because of conservatives who could not abide John McCain. And he was re-elected in 2012 in part because of disgusted conservatives who fail to heed Voltaire's principle and refused to vote for the milquetoast conservative, Mitt Romney. But surely it is obvious in hindsight that the milquetoast would have been preferable to the radical?

And now we face another ugly choice, this time between the vulgarian Trump and the hard-leftist Hillary. Some will vote for neither or throw away their vote on a third-party candidate. If you are a liberal, I warmly recommend that you vote for Jill Stein.

But if you are a conservative, you must vote for Trump. What is the force of the 'must'? It is at least prudential, if not moral. It is surely not legal. You are not legally obliged to vote in these United States. This is the way it should be.

Politics is a practical business conducted in a far from perfect world. While it is not always about the lesser of evils, in most situations it is, including the one before us. But perhaps we should avoid the word 'evil,' which I have found confuses people. Let's just say that in the real world political choices are not between the good and the bad, but between the better and the worse. Real-world politics is not about being ideologically pure. It is about accomplishing something in a concrete situation in which holding out for the best is tantamount to acquiescing in the bad. Political choices are forced options in roughly William James' sense: he who abstains chooses nolens volens, willy-nilly. Not choosing the better amounts to a choice of the worse.

Now maybe that is too strong a way of putting it if precision is at a premium. After all, if you refuse to vote for Trump, that is not a vote for Hillary since you may vote for neither. But by not voting for Trump, you aid Hillary inasmuch as you fail to do something that you can very easily do that will have the admittedly tiny effect of impeding her in her Obaminable quest to "fundamentally transform America."

I am of course assuming that Trump is better than Hillary. That is easily shown by the SCOTUS argument which has been elaborated by any number of distiguished commentators including William J. Bennett, Dennis Prager, and Hugh Hewitt, not to mention your humble correspondent. The responses to the SCOTUS argument that I have seen are breathtakingly lame. I am not in the mood to go over this ground again. In any case it is time for lunch.

Don't be a fool. Don't let the best or the better become the enemy of the good. Try to achieve something achievable. Don't pine after the unattainable. Impossible dreams are for liberals, not reality-anchored conservatives. It did not surprise me when I learned that Ted Kennedy's favorite song was The Impossible Dream. Figures!

I Pity the Poor Activist

I pity the poor activist for whom the real is exhausted by the political. But I detest these totalitarians as well since they seek to elide the boundary between the private and the public.

We need to battle them in the very sphere they think exhausts the real. But it is and must be a part-time fight, lest we become like them. Most of life for us conservatives must be given over to the enjoyment and appreciation, in private, of the apolitical: nature, for example, and nature's God.

Apatheia and the News

Why follow the disturbing events of the day, thereby jeopardizing one's peace of mind, when one can do nothing about them? Apatheia and the news don't go well together. Withdrawal and retreat remain options to consider. But on the other side of the question:

The temptation to retreat into one's private life is very strong. But if you give in and let the Left have free reign you may wake up one day with no private life left. Not that 'news fasts' from time to time are not a good idea. We should all consume less media dreck. But there is no final retreat from totalitarians. They won't allow it. At some point one has to stand and fight in defense, not only of the individual, but also of the mediating structures of civil society.

I Wish I Could Stick to Philosophy . . .

. . . and avoid politics. But philosophy needs a 'safe space' within which to flourish. And that space needs to be defended against the two-fold totalitarian threat. There is the threat from radical Islam and the threat from the leftist enablers of and apologists for radical Islam. (If you insist that radical Islam = Islam, I may come to agree with you; in which case 'radical' in 'radical Islam' is a redundant qualifier. But pleonasm is but a peccadillo, if that.)

So if you are a decent human being with an ounce of gratitude for the fruits of Western civilization, then you should do your bit. At a minimum, show a little civil courage and speak out against the Muslim barbarians and the liberal-left scum who enable them while attacking our great institutions such as the universities.