We humans are ineluctably petty in various ways. It can't helped. And so we can't be faulted for the occasional pleasure we take in the petty particulars of the quotidian round, such as the way the towels are arranged on the rack or the way the lazy cats are splayed upon the bed.
Category: Human Predicament
The Less I Know of You . . .
. . . the more highly I can think of you. And the more highly I think of myself, the less I know of myself.
Servility Will Cower to Force
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America:
For my part, I am persuaded that in all governments, whatever their nature may be, servility will cower to force, and adulation will follow power. The only means to prevent men from degrading themselves is to invest no one with that unlimited authority which is the sure method of debasing them. (Quoted in Zbigniew Janowski, Homo Americanus, p. 15)
No man, and no group of men. We need checks and balances all up and down the line.
And yes the people are ovine and servile and will cower to power. That has been amply demonstrated of late by the masses' mindless donning of useless masks. Don we now our fey apparel! Let us signal our specious virtue and adherence to the party line of Lord Fauci and his minions. And when the party line shifts, we shift with it!
The other day I espied a lady, driving alone, windows rolled up, wearing a big black mask. But I was in a charitable mood. I thought to myself, "Well, maybe she just left a doctor's office where entrance required the fashion accessory in question, and she forgot to take it off." But then I waxed rather less charitable. "Is she so oblivious to the mechanics of respiration that she would leave that rag around her face when alone?"
As for Dr. Fauci, RFK Jr. has his number. You all should read his The Real Anthony Fauci. Look it up. Buy it. Study it. The author's an outlier, a decent Dem, like Tulsi Gabbard.
Human Relationships
The good ones require differences, but the differences must be complementary, not contradictory, like the halves of a natural whole that make up the whole, complementing but not contradicting each other.
Omnia Sana Sanis
"All is reasonable to the reasonable." Herein lies a reason to limit one's reasonableness.
For it is not reasonable to be reasonable in all things or in relation to all persons. We live among enemies. The enemy needs sometimes to experience the hard fist of unreason, the brute rejection, the blind refusal, the lethal blow. Or at least he must be made to fear this response, and you must be capable of making it. The good are not the weak, but those capable of violence while remaining the masters of its exercise.
Otherwise, are you fit for this world? On the other hand, it might be better not to be fit for this world. What sort of world is it in which the good must be brutal to preserve the reign of the Good?
Disingenuousness
One politician accuses another of being disingenuous. But isn't such an accusation itself disingenuous inasmuch as disingenuousness is itself necessary for polite, politic, civil, political behavior? Could one have diplomacy and civility without fakery and phoniness? Perhaps the greatest diplomatic line of all time was uncorked by Ronald Reagan in his confrontation with Mikhail Gorbachev, he of the Evil Empire: "Trust, but verify!"
The Reagan riposte makes sense diplomatically but not semantically. If I trust you, I do not verify what you say or do. If you think otherwise, then you do not know what 'trust' means.
One root of Trump hatred is his refusal or inability to play the political game in the conventional way. In a world that runs on appearances, social success demands more than a modicum of fakery, dissembling, white lies, and such. If Trump could learn to play the game in a more conventional way, but without any reduction in the size and efficacy of his political cojones, he would be unstoppable.
But this world in which there is more seeming than being is also a world of severe limitations. You cannot expect a man of action with a popular appeal to be also sensitive, articulate, refined, and literary. And vice versa. Those who are the latter tend to be of the milquetoast sort. Someone as précieux, as 'precious,' as Bill Kristol is not cut out to lead.
Preciosity does not suit the populist.
Moral Failure and Moral Capacity
Not being capable of truly horrendous crimes and sins, we moral mediocrities sin in a manner commensurate with our limitations. It follows that we are all equally sinful in that we all sin to the limit of our capacity. It is not that we always sin, but that when we do, we sin only as much as we are capable of. So James 'Whitey' Bulger and I are equal in that we both sin, when we do, only to the limit of our capacity. It is just that his capacity is vastly greater than mine. I am a slacker when it comes to sin. I have never murdered anyone because he knew too much, dismembered and disposed of the body, enjoyed a fine dinner, and then slept like a baby. Bulger did this to a beautiful young woman, the girlfriend of one of his pals when girl and pal broke up. "You're going to a better place," said the pal to the girl right before Bulger did the deed.
A while back I re-viewed* portions of the 1967 cinematic adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. Can I take credit for not being a thief and a murderer when I simply don't have it in me to do such things? Instead I do things so paltry it seems absurd to confess them, the confessing of which is possibly indicative of an ego-enhancing moral scrupulosity, a peccadillo if a sin at all.
On the other hand, the harder you strive for a high standard, the more of a moral wretch you perceive yourself to be.
The moral life is no easy life either morally or intellectually. That is to say: it is hard to live it and hard to think clearly and truly about it and what it entails.
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*The pedant in me would have you note the difference between review and re-view.
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
The passage of years has made of a man on the make a man of wisdom. He stands on a street corner, a spectator of the passing scene. An old flame from his cocky youth passes by. Gloria Mundi sees him but without acknowledgement. The old man thinks to himself, "What did I ever see in her?"
Such Sweet Sorrow
Part of what makes "parting such sweet sorrow" (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet) is the realization that one may never see the beloved again alive. Death presides over all of life; in leave-taking he steps out of the shadows. You see the glint of his scythe from the corner of the eye.
In the twilight glow, I see her
Blue eyes crying in the rain;
As we kissed goodbye and parted,
I knew we'd never meet again.
Love is like a dying ember,
Only memories remain;
Through the ages I'll remember,
Blue eyes crying in the rain.
Now my hair has turned to silver,
All my life I've loved in vain;
I can see her star in heaven,
Blue eyes crying in the rain.
Someday when we meet up yonder,
We'll stroll hand in hand again;
And in a land that knows no parting,
Blue eyes crying in the rain.
Blue eyes crying in the rain.
Written by Fred Rose and first recorded by Roy Acuff in 1947. Numerous covers.
A little known version by Ramblin' Jack Elliot.
Man is a Project
To believe in oneself is to believe beyond the evidence.
Too Many of Us
Surface all the way down. Centerlessly peripheral. All fringe, no focus. Spiritually centrifugal. Swallowed by the social. Dis-tracted. Unaware without a care. Swamped by the flesh. Oblivious. Vain, vacant, vacillating. Thoughtlessly full of useless thoughts. Incontinent in every way except micturition.
Too many of us are like this.
Once More on Envy
His mother wanted him to amount to something. His father was afraid that he might — and make the father look small.
Envy Again
How little you must know about me to envy me!
Would you envy me had you trod my paths and had thereby come to appreciate the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" (Hamlet, Act III, Scene I) that found in me their target?
Your envy, an ugly sin and deadly, is bred in ignorance which, if not a sin is nonetheless ugly — and deadly.
Envy
How little you must be to envy me!
Study history to know yourself and what you are capable of
In this important video, Jordan Peterson explains how history describes you.
Part of what he is doing is railing against the pernicious leftist displacement of evil onto external conditions, social and economic, and its removal from its original and true locus, the foul and diseased heart of the human animal. For your own good, please pay close attention to the whole talk.
Most assuredly, you would have been a Nazi had you been a German in Germany 1933-1945.
And you will be a 'woke' totalitarian commie if we don't get this country back on track. You will go along to get long. You will fall in line out of fear and the instinct of self-preservation. You will snitch on your neighbors. You will practice self-censorship. You will acquiesce in the pronoun nonsense oblivious as you are to the power of language to guide and mis-guide thought. You will submit to absurd health mandates. You will sell your birthright for a mess of pottage. And you will have no trouble rationalizing and justifying your compliance. "I have a family to support." And in other more creative ways. The capacity for rationalization in humans is near-infinite.
READINGS FOR DARK TIMES
When the light of liberty was extinguished in Germany 1933-1945, many escaped to America. But when the light of liberty is extinguished here, there will be no place left to go. The rest of the Anglosphere appears lost, liberty-wise. Consider what is happening in Australia of all places.
What was it like to live in the Third Reich? What can we learn that may be of use in the present darkness? I come back again and again to the following four.
Theodor Haecker, Journal in the Night, tr. A Dru, Pantheon, 1950.
Paul Roubiczek, Across the Abyss: Diary Entries for the Year 1939-1940, tr. George Bird, Cambridge UP, 1982.
Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, tr. O. Pretzel, Picador, 2000.
Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, The University of Chicago Press, 1955, 2017
All of these are easy reading, especially the second two.
Related: Theodor Haecker entries.