Stormfields

Owen Barfield on Imagination

2012-01-28T13:36:00.000-05:00

“Our sophistication, like Odin’s, has cost us an eye; and now it is the language of poets, in so far as they create true metaphors, which must restore this unity conceptually, after it has been lost from perception. Thus, the ‘before-unapprehended’ relationship of which Shelley spoke, are in a sense ‘forgotten’ relationships. For though they were never yet apprehended, they were at one time seen. And imagination can see them again.” (Owen Barfield, Poetic Diction (1928): 72-73)

Wonderful Drawing of T.S. Eliot, 1955

2012-01-28T13:30:00.000-05:00

From Time and Tide, April 23, 1955, pg. 523

The Fascist TSA

2012-01-23T14:59:00.001-05:00

Today's news that the TSA illegally and unconstitutionally detained a U.S. Senator is disturbing beyond imagination. We are, clearly, following the path of ancient (and modern) Rome.

My Defense--for what it's worth--of Friedrich Hayek

2012-01-23T10:36:00.000-05:00

Over at TIC.

by Brad Birzer

When Friedrich Hayek announced his personal political philosophy as an “unrepentant Old Whig” in his magnum opus Constitution of Liberty, he was reaching deep into the well of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions, even if he had originally spoken these words against his friend, Russell Kirk, in their famous Mont Pelerin debate of 1957.[1]

While the Old Whigs founded themselves rather spontaneously as a coherent movement during the 1680s in England, they drew their inheritance and patrimony from the great republican and Stoic thinkers of the Occident. As with other liberally-educated persons of his generation, Hayek frequently referenced the great thinkers of the ancient world, especially Aristotle and Cicero, in his own works, and, of course, he also cited a number of other thinkers who helped develop the Whig and republican movements during the Glorious Revolution of 1688, including James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, and John Locke. And, finally, he discussed intellectuals following the events of 1688, including Commonwealth men such John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, James Madison, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Lord Acton. Hayek rightfully viewed himself in a line of succession with these profound social critics and philosophers.[2]

Though Hayek openly rejected the label “conservative,” he did, for example, find and identify with many of the same heroes of the past as did self-professed conservatives such as Kirk and R.A. Nisbet. Indeed, with the very important exceptions of Locke, Mill, and Acton, the primary influences on all three men were nearly identical. That Hayek came from Central Europe and Kirk and Nisbet from America probably helps explain, in many ways, the desire on Hayek’s part to avoid the label “conservatism.” Its American (and English) manifestation was quite different from the continental variety. Hayek, of course, knew its twentieth-century English and American types, but he had seen much in Europe that almost certainly shaped his distaste for the term, “conservative.”

Regardless, I think it’s critically important for those of us who identify with imaginative conservatism to give Hayek his due as a thinker and a man. While Hayek has much to tell us about many things (he was, after all, accomplished in philosophy, economics, law, and psychology), I’ll offer just two of his most important ideas: the necessity of voluntary community and the fatal conceit.

Economies and Communities

Importantly, Hayek argued that while “each man knows his interests best,” one’s gifts should be used in community, where reason is “tested and corrected by others.”[3] Daniel Rush Finn has done an excellent job of contrasting Hayek’s and John Paul II’s economics in his 1999 article, “The Economic Personalism of John Paul II: Neither Right nor Left,” so I won’t try to rehash that or make the attempt to claim that Hayek’s understanding is fully commensurate with Catholic social teaching.[4] Though nominally Roman Catholic, Hayek's understanding of the individual is clearly not the same as the Catholic understanding of the human person, but it's worth mentioning here that John Paul II held Hayek in great respect. John Paul consulted Hayek on some issues in 1980; but that’s another story.

Hayek’s views on community and the role of the individual within community, however, are very western, if not completely Catholic. This is a very long passage from Hayek, but I think it’s worth quoting all of it, especially as Hayek did such an excellent job of distinguishing true individualism from false:

This entails certain corollaries on which true individualism once more stands in sharp opposition to the false individualism of the rationalistic type. The first is that the deliberately organized state on the one side, and the individual on the other, far from being regarded as the only realities, which all the intermediate formations and associations are to be deliberately suppressed, as was the aim of the French Revolution, the noncompulsory conventions of social intercourse are considered as essential factors in preserving the orderly working in human society. The second is that the individual, in participating in the social processes, must be ready and willing to adjust himself to changes and to submit to conventions which are not the result of intelligent design, whose justification in the particular instance may be recognizable, and which to him will often appear unintelligible and irrational. I need not say much on the first point. That true individualism affirms the value of the family and all the common efforts of the small community and group, that it believes in local autonomy and voluntary associations, and that indeed its case rests largely on the contention that much for which the coercive action of the state is usually invoked can be done better by voluntary collaboration need not be stressed further. There can be no greater contrast to this than the false individualism which wants to dissolve all these smaller groups into atoms which have no cohesion other than the coercive rules imposed by the state, and which tries to make all social ties prescriptive, instead of using the state mainly as a protection of the individual against the arrogation of coercive powers by the small groups. Quite as important for the functioning of an individualist society as these smaller groupings of men are the traditions and conventions which evolve in a free society and which, without being enforceable, establish flexible but normally observed rules that make the behavior of other people predictable in a high degree. The willingness to submit to such rules, not merely so long as one understands the reason for them but so long as one has no definite reasons to the contrary, is an essential condition for the gradual evolution and improvement of the rules of social intercourse; and the readiness ordinarily to submit to the products of a social process which nobody may understand is also an indispensible condition if it is to be possible to dispense with compulsion. That the existence of common conventions and traditions among a group of people will enable them to work together smoothly and efficiently with much less formal organization and compulsion than a group without such common background, is of course, a commonplace. But the reverse of this, while less familiar, is probably not less true: that coercion can probably only be kept to a minimum in a society where conventions and traditions have made the behavior of man to a large extent predictable.[5]

Hayek’s view, after all, agrees with Aristotle’s (and St. Paul’s and Marcus Aurelius’) belief that “man is by nature an animal intended to live in a polis.” That is, man must employ his particular gifts within community to make and render them meaningful.[6] Hayek was anti-utopian regarding this, however. Man is a “very irrational and fallible being,” Hayek wrote, “whose individual errors are correct only in the course of the social process, and which aims at making the best of a very imperfect material.”[7] The market process, and, consequently, the social process helps attenuate the problems of man’s inherent flaws, but it does not erase them or make somehow good. The system of private property rewards virtue and punishes vice, at least to a great extent, as well as allows entrepreneurs to try and fail and try again. As an additional advantage, private property also brings a considerable amount of harmony to a community. In this, Hayek sounds as much like Adam Smith as he does Burke. As the great Anglo-Irish statesman had argued, commerce reconciled “conflicting interests without giving one group power to make their views and interests always prevail over those of others.”[8] But, it was more to Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith that Hayek turned, arguing that commerce and virtue were not incompatible. Certainly, Mandeville and Smith each recognized that man is fallible. One can neither reshape nor redesign the human person.

One significant difference between Hayek and his republican and Whig ancestors is that the Nobel-prize winning economist believed democracy to be a strong safe-guard against tyranny.[9] Most seventeenth and eighteenth-century republican and Old Whig thinkers abhorred democracy as nothing more than mob rule. Certainly Plato challenged the concept in The Republic, arguing that democracy always devolved into the leadership of a morally suspect tyrant, because he represented the lowest common denominator. The people were too easily swayed by their emotions and passions, foregoing their rationality for the sake of the moment.[10] As with most of those in the Whig tradition, though, Hayek did call for balance within government as well as arguing for strict limitations on the actual functions of government.[11]

Importantly, though—especially here at TIC—we should return to Hayek’s relationship with de Tocqueville. Hayek, as noted above, saw himself as a de Tocquevillian, and he especially advanced de Tocqueville’s arguments regarding the voluntary association. It is only through voluntary association, whether in the private (that is, market) or the independent sector, that society experiences true progress. As Hayek wrote, paraphrasing the eighteenth-century Scot, Adam Ferguson, society develops not by human design, but rather by human action.[12] When man acts alone, he acts with only limited knowledge. This natural restriction applies equally to the entrepreneur and the politician. “This is the constitutional limitation of man’s knowledge and interests, the fact that he cannot know more than a tiny part of the whole of society and that therefore all that can enter into his motives are the immediate effects which his actions will have in the sphere he knows,” Hayek explained.[13] Because the world is so complex, it is only through human action, rather than human design, that societies grow, evolve, and truly progress.[14] Indeed, Hayek concluded, it is the knowledge problem and the price system that allows for a division of labor and, hence, a civilization to occur.[15]

The Fatal Conceit

Hayek’s second great contribution to the understanding of republicanism and whiggery is that by trying to create heaven on earth, man will instead create a hell. Hayek called this the “Fatal Conceit,” the belief that an individual can reshape the world in his own image, overturning centuries of finely-evolved history, morality, and philosophy.

In the modern world, one may trace the origins of the “Fatal Conceit” and its resulting widespread destruction of lives to the French Revolution. Burke described it well: “Have we not produced it ready made and ready armed, mature in its birth, a perfect goddess of wisdom and of war, hammered by our blacksmith midwives out of the brain of Jupiter itself.”[16] In turn, the goddess will devour its creators.

At the end of the nineteenth century, many thinkers in the Whig tradition feared the twin intellectual evils of their time, nationalism and socialism. They rightly feared these evils would individually or intertwined wreak widespread destruction upon the world in the twentieth century. Whig historian Lord Acton stressed that the end of Christendom and the western ideals would mean the rise of nationalism. “Christianity rejoices at the mixture of races,” he wrote in his famed essay, “Nationalism.” Paganism, however, “identifies itself with their differences, because truth is universal, errors various and particular.” Though written in 1862, Acton seemingly understood that a Nietzsche would soon arise. “By making the State and the nation commensurate with each other in theory,” Acton continued. Those deemed inferior, the historian argued, will be “exterminated, or reduced to servitude, or outlawed, or put in a condition of dependence.”[17] Hayek made a similar point in his December 1945 lecture in Dublin:

Whether even the small countries will escape will depend on whether they keep free from the poison of nationalism, which is both an inducement to, and a result of, that same striving for a society which is consciously organized from the top. . . . nationalism. . . is but a twin brother of socialism.[18]

The twentieth century–whether described as fatally conceited or Nietzschean–has witnessed the greatest shedding of blood of any century in world history. The sheer numbers of those killed by their own governments are simply mind boggling. According to demographer and political scientist R.J. Rummel, governments murdered nearly 170 million persons between 1901 and 1987. The Soviet Union slaughtered 62 million; China nearly 45 million (Mao and Chang Kai Check taken together); and National Socialist Germany 21 million. By contrast, war took the lives of only 35 million between 1901 and 1987.[19] More recent estimates show these figures to be much higher—roughly 205 million executed by their own states, another 50 million killed in war.

Progressives, Hayek argued, hate the natural order and the natural law. They demand that “everything must be tidily planned” by an “all-powerful central government.”[20] Ironically, their attempt to create order only begets severe and violent disorder, the shattering of the soul and the world.

Conclusion

Hayek was not a conservative, nor it is my intent that TIC should try to make him one. “Conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time,” Hayek feared. “And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality.” Hayek did praise conservatives for their ability to create and defend “spontaneously grown institutions such as language, law, morals, and conventions.” But, their victories lay in the past, he believed. Today’s conservatives, Hayek argued, “lack the courage to welcome the same undesigned change from which new tools of human endeavors will emerge.”

Most readers of TIC presumably disagree with Hayek’s assessment. Regardless, as anti-ideologues, we take the good—that which is timeless—in each man. Hayek had more than most to offer us, and his words will certainly continue to shape, limit, and inspire throughout the twentieth-first century. If we want to change our society, our laws, our culture, and our government; if we want to prevent the big government conservatives, the neo-cons, and the militaristic liberals from continuing to shape the world according to their unholy wills, we probably don’t have the right to dismiss an ally such as Hayek.

I’ll give Hayek the last words:

To the accepted Christian tradition that man must be free to follow his conscience in moral matters if his actions are to be of any merit, the economists added the further argument that he should be free to make full use of his knowledge and skill, that he must be allowed to be guided by his concern for the particular things of which he knows and for which he cares, if he is to make as great a contribution to the common purposes of society as he is capable of making.[21]

Notes:
[1] On their relationship, see Birzer, “More Than 'Irritable Mental Gestures': Russell Kirk's Challenge to Liberalism, 1950-1960," Humanitas (2008): 64-86.

[2]This is not to imply that Hayek accepted the complete corpus of each thinker’s beliefs, of course. He took issue, for example, with Aristotle several times. See Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Results of Human Action but not of Human Design,” chapter in Richard M. Ebeling, ed., Austrian Economics: A Reader (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 1991), 134; and Hayek, The Fatal Conceit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 48.

[3]Hayek, “Individualism: True and False,” 15.

[4] Daniel Rush Finn, “The Economic Personalism of John Paul II: Neither Right nor Left,” Journal of Markets and Morality 2 (Spring 1999): 74-87.

[5] Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, 22-24.

[6]Aristotle, The Politics, Book I.

[7]Friedrich A. Hayek, “Individualism: True and False,” chapter in Individualism and Economic Order (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 8-9.

[8]Hayek, “Individualism: True and False,” 13. Most importantly, see the several works of James R. Otteson, especially Actual Ethics.

[9]Friedrich Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960; Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 403.

[10]Plato, The Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 293-302.

[11]See, for example, Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Liberty, and Legislation, vol. 3: The Political Order of a Free People (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago, 1979), especially chapter 13.

[12]Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Meaning of Competition,” in Ebeling, ed., Austrian Economics: A Reader, 264-80.

[13]Hayek, “Individualism: True and False,” 14.

[14]Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review 35 (September 1945): 519-30; and Hayek, “The Results of Human Action but not of Human Design” chapter in Ebeling, ed., Austrian Economics: A Reader, 134-49.

[15]Hayek, “Use of Knowledge in Society,” 528-9.

[16]Burke, “An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs,” 92.

[17]John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, Essays in the History of Liberty (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund, 1986), 409-33.

[18] Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, 28.

[19]R.J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Press, 1994). See also Stephane Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

[20]Hayek, “Individualism: True and False,” 27.

[21] Hayek, Individualism and Economic Order, 14.

Buckley on the cover of Time, 1967

2012-01-23T10:34:00.002-05:00

Buckley on Kirk's PROGRAM FOR CONSERVATIVES

2012-01-22T20:58:00.000-05:00

Mr. Russell Kirk wrote, several years before the first edition of this book appeared, a superb collection of essays called A Program for Conservatives, which continues in my judgment to be normative in the literature of imperative conservatism.

But it is not a book the Platform Committee of the Republican Party is likely to consult when the time comes to describe its program in election year. And if it were, Mr. Kirk's book would probably not qualify as a true program for conservatives, the word 'program' having been used by Mr. Kirk as a conscious act of disdain for the social engineers who tend to believe that our problems dissipate as they are reduced to politically actionable programs, the kind of thing one wins or loses elections by proposing.

--William F. Buckley, "New Preface," in Up From Liberalism (1959; New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1968), xxi.

My favorite Tweeters!

2012-01-20T16:21:00.010-05:00

On Twitter, I follow, with great appreciation and profit (and deep thought and, at times, equally deep laughter): @louiseallain (Louise is my “best twitter friend”); @winstonelliott3; @jroii; @thejulieview; @csmorrissey; @carloberg; @joshuamercer; @stevemartintogo; @tpcarney; @bodyofbreen; @mcelhearn; @jsnell; @cagrimmett; @thekingdude; @ubookman; @mattswain; @david_m_wagner; @mattstevensloop

My favorite albums of 2011

2012-01-20T16:21:00.009-05:00

Better late than never!

Best music of 2011 (almost all progressive rock):

Big Big Train, Far Skies Deep Time. There’s not a flaw in this album. Every track, every word is exactly right (isn’t this the classical definition of "Justice"?). No matter how much praise I give Big Big Train or how hyperbolic I sound, I wouldn’t be able to express my love of this band with enough gravity. Greg Spawton and Andy Poole are probably the best song writers (and song orchestrators!) out there right now. Add perhaps the most interesting voice in rock (David Longdon) and the best guitarist (Dave Gregory) and the best drummer (Nick D’Virgilio), and what more can I write? Perfect prog.
Kate Bush, 50 Words for Snow. I’m still acclimating myself to this album. It’s all excellent except for the duet with Elton John (his voice just doesn’t fit; though, admittedly, I’ve never been a fan of anything he did after 1973). While this isn’t the album that Aeriel was, it’s brilliant in its own Kate Bush, quirky way.
Elbow, Build a Rocket Boys! Think Peter Gabriel meets Talk Talk meets u2 if you want to get the flavor of this album. I’m not really sure I get any of the lyrics, but the lead singer’s voice is compelling enough to make me want to care.
Thomas Dolby, A Map of the Floating City. Dolby has been a master of the progressive-pop format since 1982’s “One of Our Submarines” and his first album, The Golden Age of Wireless. A Map of the Floating City is great poppish music, witty (but unnecessarily r-rated lyrics; I’m not a Puritan by any stretch of the imagination, but the language is so foul that I cringe at parts of the album; and I certainly can’t play the album within earshot of the kids.)
The Fierce and the Dead, If It Carries On Like This. I’m not sure how to describe this album or the next. These two albums—featuring a master guitarist who clearly pursues art for its own wonderful and Platonic sake--is, simply put, stunning instrumental progressive rock. I’d be curious to see what adding a voice or voices would do to this music. If you’re looking for some of the most interesting music created in the last several years, look no further than this work or the solo work of Matt Stevens. From what I can tell, he’s also just a real mensch.
Matt Stevens, Relic. Experimental but deeply soulful progressive guitar.
Flower Kings, Tour Kaputt. This is a somewhat King Crimson-eque live version of FK songs. I don’t listen to it frequently or as much as I would FK’s earlier stuff (such as Revolver, one of the greatest albums ever made), but I do like it, and I appreciate what the band members are trying to accomplish with their live performances.
Gazpacho, London. More description of this band on the next entry—but this album is a live and meaningful complexity.
Gazpacho, Missa Atropos. The music of Gazpacho defies description. This particular album is an immersive concept album about human loneliness and one of the Muses. I don’t know much about these guys, but I own every one of their albums, and I have a feeling I will always buy anything Gazpacho makes. Progressive in its best sense, Missa Antropos is heart felt and meaningful in terms of music as well as lyrics. It’s clear—as is true with every one of the artists mentioned in this list—that the art is pursued for its own sake and for the sake of eternal goodness and beauty.
Marillion, Size Matters. I’ve been a fan of Marillion for two decades now. This, by far, is their best live album. It is equal parts gut-wrenching and joyously poetic in its music and lyrics.
Peter Gabriel, New Blood. Except for Rush, Gabriel has been my longest love of any of the groups/artists mentioned in this list. “So” defined so much of my senior year of high school. And, Gabriel just gets better and more interesting with age. I saw someone complain that this album is a Muzak verison of Gabriel. Ridiculous. These are minimalist symphonic arrangements of many of his songs, and they make everything fresh. Frankly, these arrangements will probably be remembered a century from now.
Rush, Time Machine. This is, of course, not a CD, but a DVD. Rush has been an important part of my life since Troy Schwartz and Brad Libby introduced them to me (during detention; oh, how I despised junior high) in the spring of 1981, seventh grade at Liberty Junior High. As with Gabriel, but in a very different style, these guys have been playing together since 1974, and they just keep getting better. If you like rock, there’s no greater rock band to listen to than Rush. Full of flair and humor even after nearly forty years of playing together, Rush and their most recent release, Time Machine, is a thing of wonder.
Steve Wilson, Grace for Drowning. This album has grown on me, as I was confused with it on first listen. Now, I can’t get enough of it. It is progressive in the truest and most experimental sense; Wilson has a great sense of silence and cacophony, space and noise. While he’s not the audiophile that Greg Spawton is, he’s very, very close.
Tin Spirits, Wired to Earth. Schnikees. What can one say? All of the members are superb, and, as with Big Big Train, Dave Gregory (Anglo-Saxon guitar demigod since the 1970s) plays lead guitar. And, how he plays—from great pop to airy Pink Floydish atmospherics to Duane Allman-style solos, Gregory can play anything with love and excellence.
Tori Amos, Night of Hunters. As with Amos’s earliest work, combine equal parts intelligence, anger, and talent, and you have her in a nutshell; her music is never pretty, but it’s always beautiful.

James Wilson on Our Right to Retake

2012-01-07T12:24:00.000-05:00

“As a man is justified in defending, so he is justified in retaking, his property, or his peculiar relations, when from him they are unjustly taken and detained.” --James Wilson, University of Pennsylvania, 1791.

Wilson has earlier signed the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

Father of Folklore, Richard Dorson, defending Kirk at Michigan State

2012-01-06T23:27:00.000-05:00

One would have hoped for a dignified and gracious statement from Michigan State College spokesman on the occasion of Russell Kirk’s resignation. His tragic and irreparable loss has cost the faculty a figure of international distinction, one of the brilliant prose writers of our day, gifted as an intellectual historian, and essayist, and a composer of short fiction. Russell Kirk is a modest and humble young man, a graduate of Michigan State College, a native of Michigan, who is brought the college an unprecedented amount the most favorable publicity. The college is bestowed no recognition upon him; he held the rank of assistant professor, teaching freshmen and sophomores, while other faculty members who have never published a line in their lives teach graduate research courses and seminars. Mr. Kirk resigned on a matter of principle, not for the purpose of securing another position; few members of the faculty can fail to respect this principle, and the administrator who now charges him with ‘irresponsible defamation’ personally praised him for his stand at the time of his resignation. The spectacle of these college spokesman running to cover to ‘defend’ themselves against these ‘charges,’which are no more than a simple statement Mr. Kirk made as to why he resigned, embarrasses and humiliates the academic community. No university will ever lose its career administrators and its tenured mediocrities; let it mourn deeply, and acknowledge in a manly way, the loss of genius.

--Richard Dorson, "Chides MSC in Kirk Case, The State Journal, Fall 1953

The BB Logo!

2012-01-06T23:18:00.001-05:00

My friend, Mark Widhalm, made this wonderful logo for me. I'm honored! Thanks, Mark. I owe you.

Kirk Resigns from Michigan State, Fall 1953

2012-01-03T09:43:00.000-05:00

--Lansing State Journal, October 1953.

All Honor to Tolkien!

2012-01-03T08:48:00.002-05:00

One of the greatest converts to Catholicism in the twentieth century, J.R.R. Tolkien, would've turned 120 today.

May he enjoy the good company of friends, a few pints, and some excellent pipeweed today in the heavenly Bird and the Baby.

Happy Birthday, Ronald!

Carl Olson, New Editor at CWR

2012-01-02T10:00:00.000-05:00

Very exciting news. My long-time friend and intellectual ally, Carl Olson, is now editor of one of the most important Catholic magazines in existence, Catholic World Report.

Congratulations to Ignatius Press for making such a fine appointment, and congratulations to Carl for being so deserving of such an excellent promotion.

For the announcement, please go here:
http://www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/1026/a_distinguished_past_a_changing_present_an_online_future.aspx

Interview Series at Catholic Vote

2012-01-01T23:10:00.000-05:00

I'm very pleased to announce a new interview series I'm conducting at Catholic Vote, entitled "Bearers of the Word." My first interviewee is lawyer, author, and editor, Gerald Russello.

Gerald did a great job, and I think it was an excellent way to start the series. I'll be publishing many more interviews in the weeks to come.

Here's a link: http://www.catholicvote.org/discuss/index.php?p=24474

Hillsdale College Faculty Statement on Academic Freedom

2011-12-29T22:35:00.000-05:00

Written by Russell Amos Kirk; Adopted by the Hillsdale College Faculty on March 2, 1995.

There is a species of freedom peculiar to the academy: it is commonly called academic freedom, and has historically been linked with tenure and various forms of due process designed to ameliorate conditions of implacable dispute. Ideally, academic freedom is that freedom to examine, dissect, describe, and explore the validity, utility, and consequences of ideas, beliefs, and institutions. Hillsdale subscribes to the ideal, but recognizes that it takes meaning only in the complex of principles which govern the entire College community and its several constituencies. The College suggests, then, the following summary statement, which may very well serve as a summary for all its principles:

Every right is joined to a corresponding duty. So it is with the principles of academic freedom to which Hillsdale College subscribes.

Hillsdale College, an independent educational institution governed by its Board of Trustees, affirms its freedom from direction by public political authority. Correspondingly, Hillsdale College recognizes its duties toward American society and toward the civilization of which we are a part.

Hillsdale College, as an independent institution, affirms its freedom from interference by interests or associations not related to the College by law or custom. Correspondingly, Hillsdale College recognizes its duties toward persons rightfully associated with the College—alumni, members of faculty and staff, and students.

Hillsdale College, as dedicated to ordered liberty in private and public concerns, affirms its concern for the intellectual freedom of members of its faculty and staff. Correspondingly, Hillsdale recognizes its duties of ensuring thorough competence and good character in its faculty and staff, as such competence and character relate to the canons of their profession.

Hillsdale College, in keeping with its commitment to principles of ordered liberty, affirms its desire to develop responsible freedom of thought and choice among its students. Correspondingly, Hillsdale College recognizes its duties of imparting to students habits of mind and conduct which develop an understanding of private and public order.

Hillsdale College affirms that academic freedom is bound up with a valuable legacy of other freedoms and duties. Among these are the following aspects of ordered liberty to be considered with their related moral and social obligations: freedom of worship; freedom in work; freedom in politics; freedom in the economy.

Hillsdale College affirms that all these freedoms are dependent upon the maintenance of a moral order; and that academic freedom in particular requires attachment to a body of truth, made known through the order and integration of knowledge. Of such truths the College is the conservator and renewer, and the primary function of the College is to transmit, through these truths, some measure of wisdom and virtue.

Hanukkah Begins

2011-12-20T23:03:00.000-05:00

From the First Book of Maccabees:

And after that Antiochus had smitten Egypt, he returned again in the hundred forty and third year, and went up against Israel and Jerusalem with a great multitude, And entered proudly into the sanctuary, and took away the golden altar, and the candlestick of light, and all the vessels thereof, And the table of the shewbread, and the pouring vessels, and the vials. and the censers of gold, and the veil, and the crown, and the golden ornaments that were before the temple, all which he pulled off. He took also the silver and the gold, and the precious vessels: also he took the hidden treasures which he found. And when he had taken all away, he went into his own land, having made a great massacre, and spoken very proudly. Therefore there was a great mourning in Israel.

For it was a place to lie in wait against the sanctuary, and an evil adversary to Israel. Thus they shed innocent blood on every side of the sanctuary, and defiled it: Insomuch that the inhabitants of Jerusalem fled because of them: whereupon the city was made an habitation of strangers, and became strange to those that were born in her; and her own children left her. Her sanctuary was laid waste like a wilderness, her feasts were turned into mourning, her sabbaths into reproach her honour into contempt. As had been her glory, so was her dishonour increased, and her excellency was turned into mourning. Moreover king Antiochus wrote to his whole kingdom, that all should be one people, And every one should leave his laws: so all the heathen agreed according to the commandment of the king.

And drove the Israelites into secret places, even wheresoever they could flee for succour. Now the fifteenth day of the month Casleu, in the hundred forty and fifth year, they set up the abomination of desolation upon the altar, and builded idol altars throughout the cities of Juda on every side; And burnt incense at the doors of their houses, and in the streets. And when they had rent in pieces the books of the law which they found, they burnt them with fire. And whosoever was found with any the book of the testament, or if any committed to the law, the king's commandment was, that they should put him to death. Thus did they by their authority unto the Israelites every month, to as many as were found in the cities. Now the five and twentieth day of the month they did sacrifice upon the idol altar, which was upon the altar of God. At which time according to the commandment they put to death certain women, that had caused their children to be circumcised. And they hanged the infants about their necks, and rifled their houses, and slew them that had circumcised them. Howbeit many in Israel were fully resolved and confirmed in themselves not to eat any unclean thing. Wherefore the rather to die, that they might not be defiled with meats, and that they might not profane the holy covenant: so then they died. And there was very great wrath upon Israel.

Now therefore come thou first, and fulfil the king's commandment, like as all the heathen have done, yea, and the men of Juda also, and such as remain at Jerusalem: so shalt thou and thy house be in the number of the king's friends, and thou and thy children shall be honoured with silver and gold, and many rewards. Then Mattathias answered and spake with a loud voice, Though all the nations that are under the king's dominion obey him, and fall away every one from the religion of their fathers, and give consent to his commandments: Yet will I and my sons and my brethren walk in the covenant of our fathers. God forbid that we should forsake the law and the ordinances. We will not hearken to the king's words, to go from our religion, either on the right hand, or the left.

"I've tried to prevent some wars from starting. . . "

2011-12-18T15:53:00.002-05:00

Ron Paul on Jay Leno last night. Brilliant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMUZIVYuluc

The Storm is Here

2011-12-17T16:03:00.002-05:00

Dear Readers and Friends of Stormfields, the end is near! No, not in the biblical sense, but in the sense of Republican Liberty and Virtue. The president is about to sign a bill, the NDAA, that will make 2,000 years of common law rights and traditions null and void.

For an excellent review of it, please visit this article by TAKI:
http://takimag.com/article/the_government_v_everyone#axzz1gpEp0axm

For an equally excellent review of it, please visit this statement by, perhaps, the most honest man in the House today: Representative Justin Amash (R-Grand Rapids, Michigan)

http://www.redstate.com/justinamash/2011/12/17/the-truth-about-the-new-detainee-policy/

I know we're all incredibly busy as we approach the Christmas season, but it's worth informing yourself about this heinous, un-American, un-constitutional act.

Thanks, and may God bless the United States.

[N.B. My views do not necessarily represent my most prominent employer, Hillsdale College]

I do not speak for Hillsdale College

2011-12-17T11:39:00.000-05:00

Just a quick legal/legalistic caveat: though I work at Hillsdale College and have since the fall of 1999, no view I express necessarily represents the views of the college--the college as a whole, the administration, the faculty, or the staff. In fact, as I've been reminded many times in the last few months, my views almost certainly do NOT mesh with those that predominate at Hillsdale College. So, for what it's worth, I officially distance myself and my views--stated here, on The Imaginative Conservative, on CatholicVote, on Facebook, on Google+, and on Twitter--from those expressed at and by members of Hillsdale College. My voice is mine alone.

Winston Elliott on a Conservative Foreign Policy

2011-12-17T10:44:00.002-05:00

Over at the Imaginative Conservative, the editor, Winston Elliott, has presented an admirable case for a conservative foreign policy. I think it is excellent. And, while Catholics are obviously free to agree or disagree with the positions presented, Elliott's essay nicely distinguishes a conservative foreign policy from a pacifist (leftish) one as well as from a militaristic and imperialistic neo-conservative one.

Rooted most recently in the work of conservatives such as Robert Taft, Russell Kirk, and Robert Nisbet, the conservative foreign policy vision also works very well as a part of a line tracing itself back to Augustinian and Thomist just war theory.

Just for full disclosure: Elliott is one of my closest friends and a godfather of one of my children. I also dedicated my Dawson book to him. So, while I'm not exactly objective when it comes to Elliott, I do think this piece is very well worth reading and should be read by all Catholics and Americans.

Why the Left and the Neocons Despise Liberal Education

2011-12-15T09:58:00.000-05:00

For scholars: “the pursuit of Truth puts upon them very grave responsibilities; but they need always to remember that it is Truth they worship, not humanity, and that it is by Truth they must be judged, not Demos.”

Plato’s Academy “was instituted by private persons for their ‘private, professional delight’ . . . to enable them to pursue the Truth without being servants of an evanescent community. And this idea of intellectual freedom, the freedom of the Academy, has ever since been the model for all men trained in the classical disciplines.”

Each quote is from Kirk's 1955 book, Academic Freedom. The first quote makes the left's rejection of liberal education understandable. The second quote makes the neo con's rejection of liberal education understandable.

Understandable, but still evil.

We must, as Cicero noted, hold our allegiance to the Cosmopolis, the city that transcends the boundaries of space and time.

Or, more importantly, what St. Augustine knew as the City of God.

The OFFICIAL? death of the Republic?

2011-12-15T09:42:00.002-05:00

This might be it, my friends.

Indeed, this just might make the TSA look like a bunch of boy scouts. I doubt if we've had anything quite this oppressive since the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. I think we've finally gone and done it--made the loss of the republic official.

It's been a long time coming.

http://www.infowars.com/indefinite-detention-bill-heads-to-obamas-desk/

Kirk's Autobiographical Reflections on Education, 1953-1961

2011-12-15T09:31:00.000-05:00

by Bradley J. Birzer

I’m roughly half done with chapter five—“Deconstructing and Reconstructing Liberalism”—of the Kirk book. At this point, I’m on my third or fourth title for the book as a whole, “The Age of Kirk.” As you can tell, I’m starting to lose count of titles, and I’m sure this title will fade into memory at some point, only to be replaced by an even worse title. I’d like to name the book something like “Sanctifying Mecosta,” but John Miller made me promise never to use “sanctifying” in a title again. I intend to keep that promise.

Chapter five explores Kirk’s full-out assault on the modern concept of liberalism (18th, 19th, and 20th century varieties), and his attempt to resurrect the proper and antique definition of the word.

I’ve finished the “deconstructing” part of the chapter, and I’m currently research and writing the “reconstructing” part. Consequently, I’ve had the great pleasure of re-reading—and, perhaps, reading fully for the first time—Kirk’s 1978 forgotten gem, Decadence and Renewal in Higher Education (South Bend, Ind: Gateway Books).

Much to my surprise, as I’ve forgotten much I once knew, the book is an autobiographical journey, using the declining standards of education as the hook. It contains some of Kirk’s best writing, especially in his very Platonic explanation of “moral imagination.”

Just to give you a flavor of the book, I’ve typed out what I consider to be the most important passages from the first seventy pages. As you’ll see, Kirk understood his subject well, and it’s somewhat glorious to follow his exact development of thought on this vital issue. He wrote the book, by the way, to fulfill a promise he made to T.S. Eliot, presumably sometime in the 1950s.

I hope you enjoy these passages as much as I have. Yours, Brad

***

“To T.S. Eliot, who in 1955 asked me to write such a book as this.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), dedication page]

“I am an anti-elitist. I share whole-heartedly my old friend T.S. Eliot’s objection to Karl Mannheim’s theory of modern elites. I object especially to schemes for the governance of modern society by formally-trained specialized and technological elites.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), xvii]

“And being educated, they will know that they do not know everything; and that there exist objects in life besides power and money and sensual gratification; they will take long views; they will look backward to ancestors and forward to posterity. For them, education will not terminate on commencement-day.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal  (1978), xviii]

“Promptly upon being discharged form the army in 1946, I was drafted into the department of the history of civilization at Michigan State College.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal  (1978), xxi]

“I have been visiting professor, over the years, at various colleges and universities, never lingering longer than three months consecutively on any campus; and I have lectured on more than four hundred campuses.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal  (1978), xxii]

“Our trouble, instead, is that the people who run universities, though called presidents and deans, think of themselves as businessmen, often, and endeavor to apply ‘business principles’ to the higher learning. They talk of satisfying the consumer—that is, the student, or the student’s parents—and of cost analysis; they think of the university as a species of factory, turning out units efficiently; and their whole view is quantitative, not qualitative.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), 3]

“When I was a senior, in 1940, there had been six thousand students; by 1953, there were some fifteen thousand.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal , 5]

“Increasingly politicized, the academic community was sinking into academic collectivism.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal, 12]

“The outcry about Senator McCarthy’s inquisitorial methods drowned out most discussion of the freedom of the professor as related to the decline of academic standards.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal, 13]

“Academic freedom is a peculiar privilege, possessed by the scholar and the teacher because they are presumed to be dedicated men, members of what Coleridge called ‘the clerisy’, men who believe that there exist abiding truths superior to the ephemeral quarrels of the house. When the scholar and the teacher lose that conviction or vocation, then the crowd will not consent much longer to confirm them in their old freedom. The debate over academic freedom in 1954 suggested, among other things, that a number of eminent professors conceived of academic freedom as merely license to say whatever they pleased to whomever they pleased; to conduct a perpetual debate without ever aspiring to ascertain any values, after the manner of the Old Sophists.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal, 16]

“These endeavors are inspired by an intemperance of intellect—the intoxications of trying to transmute wisdom into power. . . . Every right is married to a duty. That duty which corresponds to the right of academic freedom is that the scholar must be dedicated to the conservation and the advancement of truth. . . . [The professor] ought to hold steadfastly by his principles and ought to remember that, by his vocation, he has forsworn the lust after power. If he wishes to be an ideologue or a sophist, he should take himself out of the academy into the market place. . . .I believe that academic freedom should extend to the furthest limits consonant with the preservation of human dignity and all the benefits of the civil social order. But when certain persons in the Academy abuse their power and proceed to sneer at human dignity and the whole fabric of order and justice and freedom, then the license of those persons justly may be curtailed.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal, 16-18]

“The Academy, if it is to enjoy rights, must acknowledge some principles of truth, and not constitute itself as a mere sophistical debating-society, doubting everything, sneering at all old convictions. The Academy sins if the Academy places falsehood on the same platform with truth.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal, 18-19]

“In a generation like ours, which has forgotten the natural law and has knelt to Leviathan, Antigone takes on a meaning little understood during the nineteenth century. . . . There exist in human nature, common to the Greeks of the fifth century and to us, certain constant qualities. Of these qualities, among the rising talents of every generation, are a longing for poetic imagery; a dim participating in the tragic view of life; and an aspiration after ethical insights. Antigone is a great drama because it is humane in the highest sense: that is, Antigone exemplifies the educational discipline called humanitas, the training of the ethical faculty through the understanding of powerful literature. Despite all the muddled positivism and pragmatism to which college students have been subjected since the age of five or six years, truth will demand a hearing now and again. The ancient hungers of the imagination are hard to deny.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), 36-37]

“When the Academy is badly politicized, divided into intemperate political factions and dominated much of the time by one of those factions, the Academy is decadent: it has lost an object, the object of ‘objectivity,’ if you will. For the Academy is meant to be a place, and sometimes the place, for reasoned and civil discussion of matters of enduring value. It is supposed to be an assembly of philosophers, but often it sinks to an assembly of sophists. Professors who wish to exclude or to harass colleagues of differing political views—provided those views are not ruinous to the Academy itself—have forgotten the end or aim of a community of scholars.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal, 39]

“In our time, intolerant and intemperate professors generally are the votaries and the victims of ideology. ‘Ideology’ does not signify political theory or principle, although newspapermen commonly employ the word in that sense. Ideology really means political fanaticism: and more precisely the belief that this world of ours, here below, may be converted into the Terrestrial Paradise through the operation of positive law and positive planning. The ideologue, of what ever affiliation, maintains that human nature and society must be perfected by mundane, secular means. The ideologue immanentizes the religious symbols and religious doctrine.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal, 40]

“Real thinking is a painful undertaking; and the ideologue resorts to the anesthetic of social utopianism, escaping the tragedy and the grandeur of human existence by giving his adherence to a perfect dream–world of the future. Reality he stretches workshops away to conform to his dream–pattern of human nature or society. For the concepts of salvation and damnation, he substitutes abstractly virtuous ‘progressives’ and abstractly vicious ‘reactionaries.’” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal, 40]

“The impulse to find the radicalism of the intellectual is not economic or egotistic merely. The intellectual has lost religious faith; and he is seeking a substitute for religion, since man cannot rest content without belief.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal, 41]

“At bottom all differences of opinion are theological.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal, 62]

“The followers of John Dewey, if they understand their master, are committed to a rather aggressive secularism. (Dewey’s ‘Religious Humanist Manifesto’ was neither religious nor humanistic).” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal, 63]

“The grand tendency of our age is toward concentration of power. Once concentrated, any power tends to suppress the slightest challenge to its supremacy. And no form of monopoly is more oppressive than intolerant control over the mind and the conscience of the rising generation.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), 69]

“Because the ultimate questions of education are religious questions, as Plato knew, any system of instruction which forbids discussion of religious concerns cannot touch upon objects and ends; and therefore is decadent.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal, 69]

“During these years I spoke at La Jolla to a group of young men who were students of old Herbert Marcuse the unconventional Marxist. I found them civil and interested; they informed me that Marcuse and I agreed about some things, particularly about the futility of student ‘Activism’, as opposed to serious study. Marcuse was neither a lively man nor a lively writer. What did they see in him? What Kent discerned in Lear: authority. Marcuse’s, to their eyes and ears, was the potestas magisterii, the authority to teach. Their friendliness suggested that they found something of that authority in me also. I suspect that it did not so much matter to them what was taught, as that it should be taught by a man who clearly believed in the truth of what he was saying, and who possessed some reputation for learning of a sort and originality of a sort. Had they come to me first, my politics of prudence, derived from Burke, would have satisfied them as well as did Marcuse’s ideology, derived from Marx. ‘He speaks as one having authority.’” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal, 71]

“The word ‘value’ implies a relativism of taste and conduct which produces, at best, a vague eclecticism. The Decalogue is not a catalogue of ‘values’: it is a list of imperatives.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), 72]

“Yet also it remains true that college and university cannot remain indifferent upon grave ethical questions, or to the consequences of study upon the lives of students. College training ought to be intellectual in character, not moralistic; yet it dare not ignore its ultimate ethical end. And one reason why some American colleges may seem morally didactic in their methods is that ethical instruction has been neglected by parents, church, and school, where such moral precepts more properly belong.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), 73]

College Education Should Be Intellectual

2011-12-14T10:19:00.002-05:00

“Yet also it remains true that college and university cannot remain indifferent upon grave ethical questions, or to the consequences of study upon the lives of students. College training ought to be intellectual in character, not moralistic; yet it dare not ignore its ultimate ethical end. And one reason why some American colleges may seem morally didactic in their methods is that ethical instruction has been neglected by parents, church, and school, where such moral precepts more properly belong.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), 73]

Imperatives, Not Values

2011-12-14T10:14:00.002-05:00

“The word ‘value’ implies a relativism of taste and conduct which produces, at best, a vague eclecticism. The Decalogue is not a catalogue of ‘values’: it is a list of imperatives.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), 72]

Any counter examples?

2011-12-14T10:06:00.003-05:00

“The grand tendency of our age is toward concentration of power. Once concentrated, any power tends to suppress the slightest challenge to its supremacy. And no form of monopoly is more oppressive than intolerant control over the mind and the conscience of the rising generation.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), 69]

Kirk on Antigone

2011-12-14T09:22:00.002-05:00

“In a generation like ours, which has forgotten the natural law and has knelt to Leviathan, Antigone takes on a meaning little understood during the nineteenth century. . . . There exist in human nature, common to the Greeks of the fifth century and to us, certain constant qualities. Of these qualities, among the rising talents of every generation, are a longing for poetic imagery; a dim participating in the tragic view of life; and an aspiration after ethical insights. Antigone is a great drama because it is humane in the highest sense: that is, Antigone exemplifies the educational discipline called humanitas, the training of the ethical faculty through the understanding of powerful literature. Despite all the muddled positivism and pragmatism to which college students have been subjected since the age of five or six years, truth will demand a hearing now and again. The ancient hungers of the imagination are hard to deny.” [Kirk, Decadence and Renewal (1978), 36-37]

Kirk on Solzhenitsyn's Witness, 1978

2011-12-13T14:52:00.002-05:00

“I think that, despite its occasional recrudescence on this campus or that, the Marxist fad will wane in the Academy; it cannot survive the testimony of men like Solzhenitsyn.”—Russell Kirk, 1978

Peter Gabriel's SO is 25 Years Old

2011-12-13T09:21:00.000-05:00

Which means, of course, that I just missed my 25th high school reunion. Amazing.

If you were around when SO came out, Peter Gabriel is looking for memories.
http://petergabriel.com/so-submissions/

I'll have some written up soon.

Scruton on Roepke

2011-12-13T09:18:00.000-05:00

Strong writing from Scruton, not surprisingly.

Enjoy.

http://www.imaginativeconservative.org/2011/12/journey-home-wilhelm-ropke-humane.html

Big Big Train Update

2011-08-11T20:29:00.000-04:00

Today on Facebook, Greg Spawton, musician of brilliance, posted this news about forthcoming Big Big Train releases:

We don't yet have release dates but you are right to say that there will be a lot of new BBT music in the next year or two. English Electric will be released before Station Masters. Like Station Masters, EE is also a double CD but of entirely new music. The plan at the moment is to split EE so that we release CD1 of EE and then CD2 six months later. The packaging will allow flexibility so that the CD's can be bought separately but stored together as a double album. Station Masters will follow after EE CD 2.

And, David Longdon, the best voice in rock today, published a piece about recording strings yesterday for two new songs:

http://soundemporium.blogspot.com/2011/08/string-driven-thing.html

Defeat Tim Walberg, 2012

2011-08-05T22:28:00.000-04:00

I've decided to see if there's interest in defeating our current representative in the U.S. Congress, Tim Walberg. If you're interested, please click here.

Preventing Dystopian Marriage

2011-07-06T12:09:00.001-04:00

By Bradley J. Birzer

As I admitted in my last post, I have never given considerable thought to the institution of marriage. I’ve been married for 13 years, and the vast majority of my relatives and extended family have not suffered the pain of divorce. Consequently, I’ve probably taken a lot for granted.

I am especially appreciative of Thomas Peters and his responses to my three questions regarding marriage, all of which I found quite strong.

As a historian and a play-at-home theologian, though, I have always considered marriage a pre-political issue. As an institution, as proven in the first three books of Genesis, it precedes the state. It has been, and it should be, superior to the institution of the state, the government, etc.

As such, I thought it would be worth going back and looking at the debates around the issue of marriage in the first half of the twentieth century, especially among Catholics (Anglo and Roman).

In that spirit, I pulled out a copy of Christopher Dawson’s shortest book, Christianity and Sex (London: Faber and Faber, 1930). T.S. Eliot, as a director of Faber and Faber, solicited Dawson—whom he considered the most important thinker of his age—to write on the ideological attack on marriage. As with all of Dawson’s works, Christianity and Sex is a stunning and insightful examination of the numerous menaces hovering above, below, around, and near the institution of marriage.

To finish reading this post, please click here (link to CatholicVote).

Plato on Good and Evil

2011-06-15T16:52:00.001-04:00

“It is not the life of knowledge, not even if it includes all the sciences, that creates happiness and well-being, but a single branch of knowledge—the science of the good life. If you exclude this from the other branches, medicine will remain equally able to give us health, and shoemaking shoes, and weaving clothes; seamanship will continue still to save life at sea, and strategy to win battles; but without the knowledge of good and evil the use and excellence of these sciences will be found to have failed us.”—Plato

The Road to Independence: A Mike Church Film

2011-06-09T20:02:00.001-04:00

I've happily reviewed Mike Church's new movie, "The Road to Independence," at TIC:

http://www.imaginativeconservative.org/2011/06/mike-church-and-defense-of-american.html

My Nuance, "I Speak Dragon," Contest Entry

2011-06-02T10:19:00.000-04:00

Each Person a Word--with Many Stories
--Brad Birzer

As a professor of the humanities (a historian), I’m always interested in those who and that which promote(s) what is best in the human person.

This is not to suggest that all of humanity is great; I can count dozens of utterly nasty folks from the last century alone—the Lenins, Stalins, Hitlers, and Pol Pots; the horrific authors of the Holocaust camps, the killing fields, and the Gulag; the enemies of all that is good, true, and beautiful.

But, of course, it’s not fair to mention these brutal, inhumane types without also mentioning their counterparts, those who have promoted the best within each of us, those who have asked us to be more human and more humane, not less: the charitable, such as Dorothy Day and Mother Theresa; the artistic, such as T.S. Eliot and Miles Davis; the innovative, such as Henry Ford and Steve Jobs; the leaders, such as Winston Churchill and John Paul II.

Every person--famous, infamous, or merely human--has many stories; the stories of their own individual lives as well as the stories of their relations with other unique human persons and stories about the context of their own individual existences. We are, after all, each born into a particular time and place, into a particular family and culture, into and as a particular human person; each person is, as one profound twentieth-century philosopher put it, an unrepeatable center of freedom and dignity.

As I read through the other stories posted here—as a part of the “I Speak Dragon” contest—I can’t help but be humbled and more than a bit overwhelmed. So much brilliance, so much personality, so many struggles, so many successes.

Indeed, the only proof I need that Dragon Dictate is a humane piece of technology, is to read the stories of the many others who use it and who have expressed their thanks for it. This contest itself demonstrates what kind of community Dragon brings together, what kind of community it creates, what kind of community is encourages and allows to flourish. Clearly, from reading the entries, I can see that Dragon liberates us. It allows us to be more human, not less. It allows our personalities to glow—personalities that can express themselves, that can make themselves manifest in this world. While Dragon Dictate doesn’t cause our freedom or dignity (these things, of course, come from a source beyond our human rationality to comprehend fully, but given to every single person, each unique in time and place), it promotes the flourishing of all that is best within us. Dragon Dictate is, in essence, humane and good.

So, to conclude, I turn to that Great Bard of the Twentieth Century, the man from St. Louis, who spent his adult days on the streets of London, T.S. Eliot. Likening every person to a word, Eliot understood the nature of true community—a word, after all, must find itself in its interaction with other words.

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning
Every poem an epitaph.

So, Nuance, thank you for promoting each little word--each person, each unrepeatable center of dignity and freedom--providing us with new tools to make manifest what is best within us, to make our very words tangible, to let us tell our stories.

You allow the complete consort to dance together.

[To enter the contest, go here: http://ispeakdragon.nuance.com/]

Going to Ground: Big Big Train as THE Band of Our Age

2011-05-31T13:14:00.005-04:00

By Brad Birzer

[An outrageously long and somewhat circuitous review of “The Difference Machine” by Big Big Train (original release: 2007; reissued 2010).]

To see a little further/down below a mist hung over the fields/and the stars are falling away like raindrops on glass/further apart/slowing spinning dark
--Greg Spawton/BBT, 2007

Being an Audiophile Anglophile

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been an Anglophile. And, I use this term inclusively: I’m fascinated by the history, cultures, and languages of the British Isles, and all of its inhabitants—from the Celts and Picts to the Angles and the Saxons and even the barbaric, invading Danes (and many others, of course). I’m sure much of my love of all things English (and British) comes from my earliest readings of Tolkien and his vast mythology, all of, at some level, the Oxford Don wanted to represent the best of England. I’m also married to a McDonald, who happens to be more German and Swedish than Irish, but the name . . . ah, that Celtic name.

But, I’m taken with so many other persons as well, some real and some fictitious and some a bit of both in larger British history: Bran the Blessed, Arthur, St. Patrick, St. Augustine of Canterbury, St. Bede, St. Boniface, Alcuin, Alfred the Great, Harold of Hastings, the nobles, temporal and spiritual who challenged King John at Runnymede, Sir Thomas More, Edmund Burke, William Pitt, G.K. Chesterton, Winston Churchill, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, T.S. Eliot, etc., etc. And, this is just the short list.

Despite this noble lineage of great men, the British people have somewhat paradoxically chosen Arthur—defeated but asleep in Avalon, awaiting his return—as “the central figure of national heroic legend." So wrote the nearly forgotten British (himself half Welsh, half English) historian, Christopher Dawson, in 1936. After all, he believed, the British loved lost causes, especially if the loss came in the face of extreme opposition while defending what is right, good, and just. Giving one’s all for the good of British society remains a fundamental part of the British character, as proven in the last several centuries by figures such as the Anglo-Irishman Edmund Burke and Anglo-American Winston Churchill.

Such a fascination with lost causes gives the British a properly melancholic and, simultaneously, noble national character.

All of this played to my Kansas upbringing, staring across the wheat fields and sandhills, wondering what might exist beyond vast western skies.

Big Big Train

When I bask in the music of the very, very English progressive rock band, Big Big Train, I feel—at the deepest possible levels—each of these quintessentially British traits: perseverance for the good no matter the cost; and a singular melancholic intensity.

The Difference Machine flies/you can see stars right through it/your mum or your dad or your kids; or the love of your life/bring light to the dark spaces between us/Stars burn through the coins on my eyes.”
--Greg Spawton/BBT, 2007

Though I do not fully understand all of the lyrics (and this is good to my mind as mystery is a fundamental part of art), I can’t help but think of that stubborn English nobility and melancholic intensity as I listen to my most recent BBT purchase, the 2007 “The Difference Machine," reissued last year.

I first bought “The Difference Machine” as an mp3 download. I was so taken with the subtlety of the music, the instrumentation, and the lyrics, however, I happily reordered the full CD version. I’m glad to have done so, as the quality, not surprisingly, is much higher and the subtleties more distinctive. Of the six available BBT cds, I have three in cd form, and three in mp3 form. I plan on owning each of the cds over time, building my catalogue, bit by bit.

I’ve now listened to the “The Difference Machine” multiple times and in a variety of different situations: on my iPod while out for exercise; through my car stereo while driving; and on my kitchen stereo while baking (one of my loves—this weekend, I was baking English oat bread while listening to the CD; there’s something profoundly comforting about kneading bread while listening to progressive rock). There’s no bad place to listen to BBT music—as long as it’s not as mere background noise or music. It would be shame and a slap at real art to listen to BBT’s work as anything other than what it is and how it was recorded—that is, to enjoy it fully, to immerse oneself in it. It can be a soundtrack, but it needs to be a soundtrack that becomes an essential part of the visuals and the action, not merely something hovering in the background of life.

As with every other BBT release, “The Difference Machine,” simply stuns me, and it does so even more with each new listen. Indeed, I treasure each new listen, for I keep discovering layers and depths and things and beauty and sadness. I’m sure there’s a limit to the creativity that went into “The Difference Machine,” but I’ve yet to find its outer or inner most boundaries.

While there exist a number of bands and musicians I follow—and I’ve been listening to progressive rock since roughly 1972, when I was four years old—there are only a couple of bands that totally absorb my interest. Those bands have been (in order encountered):

Yes (especially, “Fragile” through “90125”); Rush (especially, “Permanent Waves” through “Power Windows”; “Vapor Trails” to present); Talk Talk (especially, the last three albums); and The Cure (especially, “Faith” through “Disintegration”; and “Bloodflowers” through “The Cure”).

To these four groups, I also include the music of Kevin McCormick. While I can objectively state that his music is as good as anything I’ve ever heard, I also must admit, he’s been one of my closest friends since 1986, so a bias toward him rather strongly exists.

Back to my larger claims. So, I’ve been listening to prog consistently since the earlier 1970s, when my older brothers introduced me (probably unintentionally) to the music of Yes, Kansas, Styx, and the Moody Blues. Not only have I listened, collected, and analyzed prog for much of my life, then, but I’ve also been a radio DJ, having my own prog show in college. I write this only to suggest that I’ve given all of this a lot of thought—in between, around, above, and near academic projects, teaching, and family obligations.

So, with all of this explanation to the above nearly forty-year old list, I add a fifth band of excellence: Big Big Train.

If Yes’s “Close to the Edge” best represented the 1970s; if Talk Talk’s “Spirit of Eden” best represented the 1980s, then, BBT’s last full LP, “The Underfall Yard” best represents the last decade of music. [Yes, I know I left out the 1990s, I’m still thinking about this one. If pushed, I would probably list Marillion’s “Brave” as the best album of that decade. But, at the moment, I’m not ready to be pushed. I’m far more certain about the others in the list, including the one I add now.]

A huge claim, I know, but I very much believe it true. And, for my good friends reading this, you know if I ever equate anything to “Spirit of Eden” (an album I’ve obsessed over way too much), I’m serious.

To me, Big Big Train—its history, its perseverance, its openness to its listeners and followers through the internet, its musicianship, its desire for reaching perfection, its poetic and imagist lyrics—represents the very best of what exists in music today. This is far from feint praise, for there’s a considerable amount of competition out there—some almost equally fine music from groups as diverse as Porcupine Tree, Gazpacho, and others.

Going back through the reviews and history, I see that Big Big Train almost broke up after the recording of their third album, “Bard.” Thank God, they didn’t. While “Bard” is the only album of BBT’s I’ve not heard, I’m quite positive—given where they’ve gone since “Bard”—that BBT was just catching its stride around the making of that album. Though I have a feeling—and I don’t know any of what I’m about to write from personal knowledge, only from the interviews, lyrics, etc.—the current members of BBT must have gone through some very powerful trials and shakeups to be where they're at, as to have the penetrating musical and lyrical insights offered on the last four cd releases.

Like the best of those many English who came before them, Greg Spawton and Andy Poole, original band members BBT, have persevered. Where they’ve gone—especially with “The Underfall Yard”—is almost certainly not something they could’ve expected a decade or so ago. Instead, “The Underfall Yard” is a product of long struggle, experience, and craftsmanship; one of those unbought graces of life, Burke often talked about—but one that can’t arrive without extreme dedication to an art, its essence and its form.

Signals fail/A moment of time/lost, home/salt water, silence.--Greg Spawton/BBT, 2007

Deconstructing "The Difference Machine"

As noted earlier, my version of “The Difference Machine” came out last year. In his own description of the album, Spawton writes:

The Difference Machine received significant critical acclaim and, at the time of writing, is our best-selling CD. After the release of Gathering Speed, we invested the proceeds in our studio to ensure we could record music at the highest possible quality for an independent band. Furthermore, Andy had gained considerable experience as an engineer and we felt much more confident in our ability to get the most out of our studio. The Difference Machine is a concept album - a 'small' story; the loss of loved ones as life progresses, set against a 'big' story; the death of a distant star. The songs for the album were written quickly. The prog rock / post-rock crossover thing was now fully formed and everything flowed very smoothly. Indeed, a number of other songs which didn't make it onto the album also came out of the writing sessions (Brambling, Hope You Made It and a 17 minute track - The Wide Open Sea.) The main musical motif for the album is set out early on in the opening track - an instrumental called Hope This Finds You. Played on viola by Becca King, the theme is restated briefly in Pick Up If You're There before returning at the end of the album in the closing section of Summer's Lease. Other musical motifs abound, some buried deeply in the music, some combining with others to form new themes. For example, the main album theme on the playout of Summer's Lease is intertwined with a motif from Perfect Cosmic Storm which is initially set out in an understated manner on electric piano, before returning as the grand closing section of the song. There's a lot of this on The Difference Machine - it is an album which is intended to pay repeated listenings with new discoveries.

After having given this beautiful album several listens, I can confirm Spawton’s own description of it.

There are eight tracks on the 2010 version of “The Difference Machine.”

The opening track, “Hope this finds you”—a short but powerful instrumental, captures the very being of the entire album, setting out the themes of wide open space and vast emptiness, but, with the entrance of the viola on this track, a deep and abiding sorrow appears, thus closing the abstract space into something intensely personal, even intimate.

“Perfect Cosmic Storm” begins with a strange signal and some dissonance. A disembodied voice beckons: “signals go to ground” and then, circling the listener, cries “For me there is not hope at all.” From what I can tell, as a listener immersed in this man’s longing and despair, he believes he has either died or is on the edge of death. His life flashes before his eyes, and “before I go to ground,” he catches a glimpse of some of the happiest things of his existence: children, parents, and all good that connects one good thing to another, the moments and persons and relationships that allow us to transcend this overwhelmingly dark life.

At over fourteen minutes, the second track, “Perfect Cosmic Storm” is a masterpiece in every way. Every voice and every instrument finds its exact place, and while much of the music is chaotic, there is an order to it all (especially beginning at 5:47 into the song, when the sax (itself, used here as an instrument of despair) comes in), just as there is for the dying man of the story. When, at 6:30, the singer comes back in with “Signals go to ground,” the listener breathes a sigh of relief. No relief remains permanent, though—as dissonance and counter harmonies continue throughout the remainder of the track. Musically, the listener is left with the feeling that the protagonist has some massive choice still confronting him.

Spawton’s lyrics make this a brilliant song. But, of course, a number of other things also make this song one of near perfection. Nick d’Virgilio’s drums and Dave Meros's (of Spock's Beard) bass are some of the best of each I’ve ever had the privilege to hear. Though he can play any thing and any type of music, D’Virgilio was clearly made to play the music of Spawton and Poole. They clearly bring the best out of each other.

The third track, “Breathing Space,” is exactly what it seems from its title. A profound openness emerges during this song, but it’s not the dead space of the first track. One feels as though the protagonist has realized either that he’s not quite dead or that he has some kind of redemption and permanent happiness awaiting him. It must be early evening in the song, as crickets chirp and space signals continue to emanate from somewhere. Again, though, the space in this song is comforting.

In track four, “Pick Up if You’re There,” the protagonist, now realizing that the abyss is not all that confronts him, searches for signs of life, signs of the good. He climbs a hill, but only sees a mist shrouding all below him. Turning his gaze to the heavens, he sees only falling stars. Spawton offers some of his best poetic moments in lyrics to this song.

The drums, bass, and organ are especially strong on this track, driving the protagonist toward some thing, whether that “some thing” be good or ill or a purgation of the worst or the best. “You can almost taste the pain/you can almost touch it.” And, again, D’Virgilio’s drums and, this time (especially beginning around 4:39 into the song), Pete Trewavas’s bass is nothing less than breathtaking, as is Tony Wright’s flute at 8:40 into the track.

But, the jam (especially the interplay of drums, bass, and Greg’s organ) beginning around 10:05 is my favorite single moment/part of the album. With this jam, the listener knows with certainty that the protagonist is heading somewhere and fast. I'm still not quite sure where he's going, but I know he’s moving at an outrageous speed. “One by one the signal’s fail/the sky is full of comet’s tails/--pick up if you’re there.”

“From the Wide Open Sea,” a track foreshadowing, in title and theme, the final track of BBT’s 2010 ep, “Far Skies Deep Time,” serves the same function as track three. The listener can relax, at least momentarily, as the spacey keyboards swirl, offering a bit of maternal comfort—the comfort of that patroness of sea farers, the Star of the Sea.

Track six, “Hope you made it,” is another short song. Despite it’s relative brevity, the song’s lyrics cast much doubt on the fate of the protagonist. Life seems to break this man, and the best escapes him. “Mercury falling over the snow fields/the passage of time/as the notes in the margins/the last day of summer/the last day you loved her.” Is all of life nothing more than sporadic marginalia, a moment of brightness here or there, destroyed by even greater darkness?

“Saltwater (falls on uneven ground)” is my favorite track. After a hauntingly false introduction, the song quickly changes direction, and we have an Eliot-esque man, a “hollow man,” unable to keep any semblance centricity to his life. And yet, as typical with BBT, a brief hope emerges. The sky brightens, and though the ground is frozen, the protagonist hears his love—or what he thinks is his love—walking behind him. Perhaps the protagonist is being pursued by his Beatrice rather than he pursuing his Beatrice.

From my perspective, lyrically, this song serves as the most important moment of the album. The protagonist, as close to death as possible without actually crossing into the shadow realm, sees before him the cold and relentless grasp of winter. As he does, voices of men and beasts (a cat that sounds strangely Pink Floyd-esque) as well as the signals from space engulf him. BBT offers several minutes of a really laid-back jam (ok, I have no other way of explaining this; I realize laid back and jam don’t work well together—but BBT masters it). At 8:41, the protagonist, surrounded by a cold winter death, suddenly remembers the glories of summer, “days without end/exploding with fire.” If these days of summer truly exist without end, the man only has to claim them as his true eternity. “Extraordinary again,” the lyrics conclude.

The final track, “Summer’s Lease,” gives us no settled answer as to the fate of the protagonist. Summer conquers winter, and love rears its profound head among the prevalent pain of the world. But, the protagonist still seems somewhat lost. At 3:14, the song becomes relentless, frantic. “Where did you come from/where will you go to?/Don’t go away (repeated several times),” the protagonist cries. Every instrument seems to explode here. At around 4:56, the song becomes simple again—a rhythmic return to the rather melancholic themes of the album as a whole.

“Signals fail/a moment of time/lost home/salt water, silence/where did you come from /where will you go to?/Don’t go away.” And with these lyrics, backed by Spawton’s best keyboard work of the album as well as that pursuing viola of Becca King and sax of Tony Wright, the story ends as the piano fades out. “Summer’s lease” seems to have run out.

Again, I’m not quite sure where I’m left. I, Brad, am deeply satisfied, musically, after the umpteenth listen to “The Difference Machine.” But, what of the protagonist of the album? Did he make it to eternal happiness, eternal damnation, or just simply nothingness?

Summa

Well, if it’s not clear by now, I think the world of this lp. If “The Difference Machine” is not a part of your collection, it should be by the time you have finished this outrageously long review.

Overall, while I consider “The Underfall Yard” to be the gold standard of our time (hence, on my professorial scale, earning an A+), I would award “The Difference Machine” a solid A. Its sins, such as they are, are sins of omission, not commission. After so many listens to “The Underfall Yard,” I’ve come to expect the guitar work of Dave Gregory, the vocals of David Longdon, and the drum work of Nick d’Virgilio on every song. That is, I've been spoiled. Had I listened to "The Difference Machine" before listening to "The Underfall Yard," I would've certainly awarded it an A+ as well. But, after hearing "The Underfall Yard," I'm not sure what else can measure up to it.

While Spawton and Poole have offered us everything they have (and, that’s as good as it gets—which is spectacular) on “The Difference Machine,” “The Underfall Yard” possesses all of the best of its immediate predecessor while also giving us, the listeners, the permanent addition of Dave Gregory and Nick d’Virgilio. And, while I really am taken with the vocals of Sean Filkins, I’m really, really taken with the voice of David Longdon.

So, after all of this, my respect for the stubborn English nobility and melancholic attitude toward life has only increased. Indeed, it has been made manifest in the very art into which I immerse myself. Long live Spawton and Poole.

+++

To order the works of Big Big Train, please go here. Hit the "Shop" tab.

Transnational Law: An Essay by Allen Mendenhall

2011-05-24T21:06:00.000-04:00

I had the great privilege of getting to know Allen Mendenhall, a man of fine intellect and taste, several years ago in Tennessee. We spent a week at an IHS conference together, and I don't think we ever ran out of things to say to one another.

Regardless, here's a fascinating essay that Allen has just published on the meaning of transnational law. Enjoy.

http://www2.libertarian.co.uk/?q=node/326

Wonderful Kirk Quote, 1957

2011-05-19T19:07:00.000-04:00

I came across some quotes from a speech given by Russell Kirk in 1957. The occasion--St. John's University awarded Dr. Kirk an honorary doctorate, a Doctorate of Humane Letters. Two years later, it would award Christopher Dawson with the same doctorate.

What a stage--two of the greatest men of the twentieth century, speaking and being recognized for the immense good they each offered to western and Christian civilization. It makes the heart pound! I have no idea who was president of St. John's at that time--but I'm immensely curious now.

Well, enough of my blathering. . . . here's part of what the New York Times reported:

The humane person is a conformist not to fads and foibles and appetites of the hour but to eternal truths. The university enjoins conformity to truth and declares that the truth about human nature has long been known to wise men, who have apprehended human norms.

Any presidents of universities or colleges out there now willing to do such gutsy things? Here's hoping. . . .

30 Years Ago Today: Ronald Reagan's First Anti-Communist Speech

2011-05-17T09:35:00.002-04:00

Over at Catholic Vote:
http://www.catholicvote.org/discuss/index.php?p=17108

I remember the day well. And, I miss President Reagan very much.

Russell Kirk and the Nuances of Liberty, 1956

2011-05-12T14:47:00.000-04:00

Russell Kirk and the Nuances of Liberty, 1956

[posted originally at TIC]

The issue of freedom and liberty served—rather needlessly from the perspective of hindsight—as a nasty sticking point between libertarians and conservatives in the 1940s and 1950s. Each side desired freedom and liberty (I’m using them here as roughly interchangeable terms), of course, but one side believed liberty absolute and abstract, the other considered it earned only through struggle and tradition, understood in its historical and cultural contexts.

From this division, scholars of the 1950s viewed the past in a rather Manichean way. One could either ally oneself with Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson on the one side or with Edmund Burke or Alexander Hamilton on the other. That is, one either embraced the abstract liberty or the manly order.

Of course, this begs a question regarding two other heroes of the right.

What could one possibly do with men such as Adam Smith or Alexis De Tocqueville?

Libertarians especially attacked Kirk for his views (as witnessed in the secret notes from Rothbard, published on this site a couple of days ago, courtesy of Mises.org). The most vehement attack on Kirk from the Right, though, came from Frank S. Meyer.

“Only the principles of individual freedom—to Dr. Kirk the ‘conservatism of desolation’—can call a halt to the arch of collectivism. The New Conservatism [a 1950s term for Kirk’s thought; no relation to present-day neocons], stripped of its pretensions, is, sad to say, but another guide for the collectivist spirit of the age.” [Frank Meyer, “Collectivism Rebaptized,” The Freeman (July 1955)]

Meyer had simplified Kirk’s to a gross degree, as Kirk was far more nuanced than Meyer allowed. Kirk’s subtleties, Meyer complained, were merely symptomatic of the Michiganian’s rhetorical thinking rather than his rational thinking.

Throughout forty years of professional writing, Kirk never came to a firm conclusion regarding the question of whether order or freedom trumped the other. During some of his career, he emphasized liberty, during other times he emphasized order, but never one at the expense of the other.

In the following excerpts, Kirk wrestles out loud with one of the most important issues of his day. Just as the question of order and liberty presents a problem in understanding Kirk’s thought, so it presents a problem for all of us on the Right today.

It should be noted that Kirk does embrace a theory of natural rights, but he does so in a way that would not be recognizable to most adherents of that doctrine today.

Please enjoy a little Kirk from 1956.

All of the following come from: Russell Kirk, “Conditions of Freedom,” Commonweal (January 13, 1956): 371-373.

***

“Every right is married to a duty; every freedom owns a corresponding responsibility; and there cannot be genuine freedom unless there is also genuine order in the moral realm and the social realm. Order, in the moral realm, is the realization of a body of transcendent values—indeed a hierarchy of values—which give purpose to existence and motive to conduct. Order, in society, is the harmonious arrangement of classes and functions which guards justice and gives willing consent to law and insurers that we all shall be safe together. Although there cannot be freedom without order, in some sense there is always a conflict between the claims of order and the claims of freedom. We often express this conflict is the competition between the desire for liberty and the desire for security. Although modern technological revolution and modern mass–democracy have made this struggle more intense, there is nothing new about it in essence. President Washington remarked that ‘individuals entering into a society must give up a share of their liberty to preserve the rest.’ But doctrinaires of one ideology or another, in our time, continue to cry out for absolute security, absolute order, or for absolute freedom, power to assert the ego in defiance of all convention. At the moment, this fanatic debate may be particularly well discerned in the intemperate argument over academic freedom. I feel that in asserting freedom as an absolute, somehow divorced from order, we are repudiating our historical legacy of freedom and exposing ourselves to the danger of absolutism, whether that absolutism be what Tocqueville called ‘democratic despotism’ or what recently existed in Germany and now exists in Russia. ‘To begin with unlimited freedom,’ Dostoevski rights in The Devils, ‘is to end without on limited despotism.’” (Page 371)

“It is quite possible for man, in ancient or modern times, to be materially prosperous, and freed from the necessity of choice, and yet servile. It is also possible that he may suffer no outrageous oppression. But he must always lack one thing, this servile man, and that is true manhood, the dignity of man. He remains a child; he never comes into man's birthright, which is the pleasure and the pain of making one's own choices.” (Page 372)

“Liberty, prescriptive freedom as we Americans know it, cannot endure without order. Our constitutions were established that order might make true freedom possible. For all our American talk of private judgment, dissent, and individualism, still our national character has the stamp of a respectful order almost superstitious in its power: respect for the moral traditions inculcated by our religion, and for the prescriptive political forms which we, more than any other people in the world, have maintained little altered in this time when Whirl is King of most of the universe. I think that we would do a most terrible mischief to our freedoms if we ceased to respect our established order and began, instead, to run after an abstract Jacobin liberté—in this age of the triumph of technology, of all times.” (Page 372)

“When most people use the word ‘freedom’ nowadays, they use it in the sense of the French Revolutionaries: freedom from tradition, from established social institutions, from religious doctrines, from prescriptive duties. I think that this employment of the word does much mischief. For we do not live in an age—and there are such ages—which is oppressed by the dead weight of archaic establishments and obsolete custom. The danger in our era, rather, is that the fountains of the great deep will be broken up and that the pace of alteration will be so rapid that generation cannot link with generation. Our era, necessarily, is what Matthew Arnold called an epoch of concentration. Or, at least, the thinking American needs to turn his talents to concentration, the buttressing and reconstruction of our moral and social heritage. This is a time not for anarchic freedom, but for ordered freedom. There are much older and stronger concepts of freedom than that espoused by the French Revolutionaries. In the Christian tradition, freedom is submission to the will of God. This is no paradox. As he that would save his life must lose it, so the man who desires true freedom must recognize a providential order which gives all freedoms their sanction. The theory of ‘natural rights’ depends upon the premise of an on alterable human nature bestowed upon man by God. Only acceptance of the divine order can give enduring freedom to a society; for this lacking, there is no reason why the strong and the clever, the dominant majority or the successful oligarch, should respect the liberties of anyone else. Freedom without the theory of natural rights becomes simply the freedom of those who hold power to do as they like with the lives of those whose interests conflict with theirs.” (Page 373)

“Our problem is how to reconcile respect for true human dignity, personality, with the demands of social cooperation. And that is a most difficult problem. Very few people really are interested in true freedom, in any era; most folk always go for security, secular conformity, and enforced routine, at the price of independence. But the freedom of the few who really deserve freedom—and they are fewer in our time than ever they were before, I am inclined to believe—is infinitely precious; and in the long run, the security and contentment of the whole of humanity depends upon the survival of that freedom for a few. The great danger just now is that, in the name of general security, we shall neglect altogether the claims of the minority who need and deserve freedom. We seem bent on establishing a universal equalitarian domination which will call itself free and democratic, but which will have made existence almost impossible for those natures that seek to obey the will of God and to abjure desire.” (Page 373)

A few posts elsewhere

2011-05-11T10:08:00.001-04:00

At Ignatius, my take on the current state of Progressive Rock and why Catholics should take it seriously.

At TIC, a brief quote from C.S. Lewis from THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH.

At Catholic Vote, a piece against the culture of gossip.

Enjoy!

Music and Me

2011-05-03T15:25:00.002-04:00

(first written ca. 2006)

The youngest of three boys, born in the summer of love (September 6, 1967—only 3 months and five days after the release of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” by the Beatles), and coming of age in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I grew up on progressive rock: Yes, Kansas, Genesis, and the Moody Blues. It was the kind of music that shunned the 3-minute pop format and attempted to create 20- and 30-minute epics of European (usually liturgically derived) symphonic music with rock instrumentation and bizarre time signatures. The lyrics as well as the cover art tended to be fantastic, pretentious, overblown, and theological. (Wow, I think I just described my own views about many things!) There have even been some interesting scholarly articles about progressive rock thriving in the western and midwestern states, mostly among middle-class, conservative kids. And, of course, we, with great confidence, derided disco and top-40 music through junior high, high school, and college. Disco and top-40 music, as we knew it, was decadent and vacuous. As far as we were concerned, progressive rock artists (and some New Wavers) were the only real musicians outside of the classical world.

In many ways, progressive rock helped define my own childhood and teenage years. I will never forget seeing abolitionist John Brown on the cover of a 1974 Kansas album (it sparked all kinds of historical questions re: Kansas, abolitionism, and the American Civil War); hearing Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” at the University of Notre Dame in the fall of 1979; being introduced to Rush’s 1981 “Moving Pictures” in the Liberty Junior High School library in Hutchinson, Kansas; or listening to Yes’s “Fragile” over and over again and trying to figure out the “deep” meaning of the lyrics (there isn’t any, by the way). In high school, I worked as on overnight D.J. at a local rock station (KWHK), which doesn’t exist anymore. And, while in college at Notre Dame, I had a Friday-night progressive rock show (WSND) my junior and senior years.

Turning 13 in the autumn of 1980, I also, of course, grew up with New Wave: The Police, The Cure, Siouxie and the Banshees, and Echo and the Bunnymen. My college radio show at Notre Dame focused on progressive rock, as mentioned above, but I threw in a lot of New Wave. New Wave just seemed the more radio-friendly version of progressive rock. And, by the early 1980s, progressive rock seemed to have run its course. Could Asia really claim to be the successor of Yes? Or, could Genesis without Peter Gabriel or Steve Hackett really be Genesis? We answered with a resounding “no.” That left us with New Wave.

A quarter of a century later, I realize that music took on religious significance for me and my friends. Those who embraced disco, pop, or top 40 music were heretics, and we supporters of progressive rock were the orthodox. It’s all more than a bit embarrassing to think about and remember now. But, it’s also a bit of a nostalgic blast.

My Top Seven Progressive Rock Albums (in no order after the first three)

Kevin McCormick, Squall (1999). Some of the best music ever written—but tempered with very serious classical sensibilities and lacking the bombast present in even the best of progressive rock. McCormick incorporates his profound poetry as lyrics. Each word—and the way Kevin sings it—seemed utterly filled with Christian grace and conviction. This is part two of trilogy (he’s working on number three). And, it’s hard to listen to Squall without listening to its equally fine predecessor, With the Coming of Evening (1993).

Talk Talk, Colour of Spring (1986). I could certainly regard this as either my top album of all time (though interchangeably with Squall and Spirit of Eden; depends on my mood), or close to it. I couldn’t even count how many times I’ve listened to it. I bought it on a whim—because I liked James Marsh’s cover. My whim paid off, as it opened a whole new realm of music to me. But, what’s not to like: impressionist 1950’s Jazz and 1960’s Stevie Winwood mixed with intensely Christian lyrics.

Talk Talk, Spirit of Eden (1988). Every note and word is perfect. Mark Hollis and Tim Friese-Greene spent 14 months in a church recording this album. Hard to beat the 20+ minute opening to the album. And, the lyrics—better than most hymns I hear in church, to be sure. Side two even has a song with St. Ignatius of Loyola’s prayer asking for the grace to surrender one’s will to God.

Yes, Close to the Edge (1972). Ok, I’m noticing a pattern as I write out these descriptions—this album, as I understand it, is about the Reformation. Anderson and co. incorporate high-church Anglican music and choral arrangements as they sing about Christ the Word.

Genesis, Selling England by the Pound (1973). Heavily influenced by the poetry T.S. Eliot, Peter Gabriel soars on this album. Pastoral and very English.

Pink Floyd, Animals (1977). Continuing the fantasy and science-fiction themes of their earlier albums, Roger Waters and David Gilmore seriously challenge the right of one human to exploit another in this George Orwell inspired album.

Flower Kings, Space Revolver (2000). Lyrics range from weird to wacky, as does the music. Pro-Christian themes abound, but placed within a rather Scandinavian pastoral setting.

My Top Seven non-Progressive Rock Albums (in no order)

Thomas Dolby, Golden Age of Wireless (1982). This was my introduction to New Wave. Wild arrangements and very Bradbury-esque lyrics. It became my anthem during high school debate and forensics.

Sarah McLachlan, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (1993). I can’t explain why this album means so much to me, but it does. I love McLachlan’s voice and use of organ. And, this first album lacks the nasty anti-Christian and pro-feminist cant of her later work. When I worked at the Organization of American Historians in graduate school, we would play this CD as we played Quake on the network (after business hours, of course).

Echo and the Bunnymen, Ocean Rain (1984). Beautiful and bizarre—musically and lyrically. Probably the most Doors’ inspired album of the New Wave movement. While the lyrics don’t quite rival those of Morrissey (in the Smiths), the music surpasses anything Johnny Marr wrote. A staple for me in college. I’m just sorry that some of the lyrics are heretical.

Traffic, John Barleycorn Must Die (1970). What can I say about Stevie Winwood, Jim Capaldi, and Chris Wood? Jazz-rock with Anglo-Saxon folktales thrown in. Lots of Traffic is excellent, but this surpasses all of their other albums.

Van Morrison, Astral Weeks. Introspection without pure naval gazing. And, no body writes better about the beginnings of love than Van Morrison. Must be something in the Irish soul. As I understand it, the album was done in one take with the jazz musicians being given the music when they entered the studio. Perfect for a spring day.

The Cure, Disintegration (1990). From the beginning to the end, a masterpiece. Perfect pacing, and fascinating arrangements. The Cure’s flaw is their tendency to write hyper, bouncy pop songs. While Disintegration has a few of these, they remain tempered by the more serious, gothic moments on the album. And, hey, the album begins with early medieval plainsong. I might, however, very well classify this album as “progressive.”

Radiohead, Kid A (2000). Intense lyrics about the problems of post modernity and scientism. Though Ok, Computer has better moments, Kid A has no real flaws. The lyrics, however, remain unimportant, ultimately, as Thom Yorke’s voice serves as another instrument on the album. The producer, Nigel Godrich, deserves credit for being an equal member of the band. The opening track, “Everything in its right place” sums up the production.

Serious honorable mentions: Talk Talk, Laughing Stock (1991); Marillion, Brave (1992); The Police, Synchronicity (1983); Yes, Drama (1980); XTC, Skylarking (1986); XTC, Nonesuch (1992); Kate Bush, Hounds of Love (1985); Kate Bush, Aeriel (disc 2; 2005); and Simple Minds, New Gold Dream (1982).

Tin Spirits, Wired to Earth

2011-04-18T15:56:00.003-04:00

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, we seem to be in the middle of a prog rock revival. Well, middle I suppose is fairly accurate. It seems to have started shortly after Radiohead released its “Ok Computer.”

The latest addition to an already fabulous revival is the first album written and recorded by the Tin Spirits, “Wired to Earth.”

Here’s the history of the band (only three years old) from their own website:

Tin Spirits first got together in Swindon UK in the summer of 2008, when Daniel Steinhardt from TheGigRig invited former XTC guitarist (and musical hero) Dave Gregory to a local studio to video record an 'amp shoot-out' with Dan's band The Hi-Fidels, comprising bassist Mark Kilminster and drummer Doug Mussard.

All enjoyed the experience so much they decided to take things a stage further and rehearse some of the more challenging music they'd grown up listening to but never had the chance to perform.

Tin Spirits soon assembled a strong repertoire of guitar-orientated prog covers, together with a few XTC songs, and began playing gigs in 2009 to very positive audiences.

Today, with the impending release of their debut offering 'Wired to Earth', their star is very much in the ascendant.

Dave Gregory (guitar) was a member of UK band XTC for 19 years, performing on the hits 'Making Plans For Nigel', 'Senses Working Overtime' and 12 studio albums, including the band's alter-egos The Dukes Of Stratosphear.

He is probably more familiar to Marillionaires through his work on Steve Hogarth's 1996 album 'Ice Cream Genius', and as a member of Steve's legendary h-Band. With few interests outside music, Dave continues to work as the spirit moves him, recently playing sessions for Bournemouth prog-heads Big Big Train, and writing and recording at home for Tin Spirits - the band, he says, which has saved his musical life.

Although Daniel Steinhardt (guitar, vocals) is most commonly associated with TheGigRig.com, his career in Australia has seen him play with some of the biggest artists in the country and tour the world extensively. Dan was Max Sharam's guitarist for many years (Max's song 'Coma' was recently voted in the top 10 best Triple J singles of all time). His work with his company TheGigRig is based around designing systems to allow guitarists to reach their 'tone potential', so you can be sure the band is well equipped.

As talented as he is pretty, Mark Kilminster (bass, vocals) has performed around the globe, and recorded with some of the biggest names in the business. He beat out 20,000 applicants to become lead vocalist for Stamford Amp, the house-band on the BBC 1 Saturday morning television show 'The Saturday Show' in 2001. The band scored a Top 40 single and an appearance at the Proms In The Park in London's Hyde Park. Mark is a huge Marillion fan and has his picture on .com somewhere

Doug Mussard (drums, vocals) played 'Ringo' in the original Ludwig Beatles, and did occasional gigs with Mike d'Abo's Mighty Quintet in the late 1990s. Considered by many to be Swindon's best kept musical secret (and now Dave Gregory's favourite drummer!), Doug plays regular gigs and sessions, and continues to perform with Dan and Mark in the Hi-Fidels.

Whatever the official history, The Tin Spirits provides much in the way of intensity and beauty. Though relatively short, "Wired to Earth" packs a fierce punch. I’ve been listening to it, almost nonstop, since it arrived from England a week or so ago.

The first song, “Glimmer,” has a very spacy and open feel. Warm guitars welcome one into the music.

“. . . and go,” the second song, has a very different feel than the first. This song sounds much more like Dave Gregory’s own band, XTC, at least musically. Imagine something from XTC’s Nonsuch period given prog treatment and Yes- or Big Big Train-style harmonies.

“Back in NYC” comes straight from Genesis’s concept 1974 masterpiece, “Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.” Since forming in 2008, The Tin Spirits have covered lots of bands in its live shows (many available on YouTube): including Rush, Yes, and Led Zeppelin. On this third track, the listener hears The Tin Spirits covering at their best. Nick D’Virgilio, of course, redid this song a decade ago on his Genesis tribute album (Rewiring Genesis--A Tribute to the Lamb Lies Down on Broadway). It’s a brilliant cover. Hearing the The Tin Spirits’ version (much more guitar driven than the original or D'Virgilio's edition) makes one realize how much recording technology has changed, even in just a decade.

My favorite track, though, is the fourth, “Broken.” A warm song musically with somewhat dark lyrics, the song could have been written by Greg Allman and performed by Duane Allman and Dickey Betts. Indeed, though every member of Tin Spirits is from the British Isles, no better southern (American) rock song has been performed since the Allman Brothers played at Fillmore East, 1971. This song just makes me joyous.

The final song, “Breathe Shallow,” is a fitting end to a brilliant album. The song evokes traditional rock and alternative sounds from the 1980s and early nineties, but without being formulaic. At times, the song reminds me of something Matthew Sweet might have written. The vocals and harmonies on this track are especially good. Again, it’s the most straight-forward song until about 4 ½ minutes into it. The last two minutes contain some beautiful guitar and drum work—harkening back to some of Steve Howe’s and Alan White’s best interplays.

I’ve been a Dave Gregory fan for more years than I can or should count. Well, ok, I’ve been listening to his heroic guitar work since the mid 1980s. The man can play, and he can play well. Very well.

From my rather particular (and, truth be told, picky) standpoint, then, this album is a must own for any prog rock fan. It can be ordered here.

http://www.tinspirits.co.uk/acatalog/TinSpiritsShop.html

Also, make sure you check out some of the cover tunes on YouTube. The best is of Yes’s “Roundabout.” Gregory, much to my astonishment, plays Wakeman’s rather complicated keyboard parts on guitar.

Dare I write: Gregory’s version is better than Wakeman’s. Yes, I dare. Thank you profoundly, Tin Spirits. My day at the office is much warmer because of your artistic endeavors and successes.

In Praise of St. Jack

2011-04-18T15:17:00.000-04:00

Well, Professor Hingest isn't real--at least not outside of the nuanced mind of C.S. Lewis.

I've been rereading THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, perhaps my favorite modern novel apart from Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS and Cather's DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP.

Though I never encountered Lewis as a thinker until taking Professor Kenneth Sayre's course at the University of Notre Dame on "Philosophy and Science Fiction," I've probably read THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH ten times or so since college. It only gets better with each reading.

In it, Lewis challenges every form of progressivism as an attack on the very nature and dignity of man.

I came across this passage the other day, and I’ve not been able to get it out of my own limited mind. It’s from a conversation between Professor Hingest and Mark Studdock, just right before Hingest is murdered.

I happen to believe that you can’t study men: you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing. Because you study them, you want to make the lower orders govern the country and listen to classical music, which is balderdash. You also want to take away from them everything which makes life worth living and not only from them but from everyone except a parcel of prigs and professors.

Such a quote, put in the mouth of a scientist, only makes me realize how beautifully backward and reaction Lewis must’ve been in his own day. How many prominent men of letters and of prominent positions really changed progressivism at its most fundamental level in the 1930s and 1940s? Lewis, Tolkien, Owen Barfield, T.S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain, Christopher Dawson, Friedrich Hayek, Roy Campbell, Etienne Gilson, Bernard I. Bell, Pope Pius?

Many others?

Probably not.

It must’ve been a very lonely path.

If you're interested in finishing the article, please click here.

April 5th--The Colour of Spring

2011-04-05T12:31:00.002-04:00

In the spring of 1987, while browsing the new music at the Hammes Bookstore at the University of Notre Dame, I fortuitously came across an album called “The Colour of Spring” by a group I had previously dismissed as nothing more than a trendy New Wave band with the bizarre name of Talk Talk.

Though I knew next to nothing about Talk Talk or their music, I was quite taken with the cover, a James Marsh painting of a number of butterflies and moths with a variety of surreal designs on them. Judging the album by its cover, I decided to take a chance and make a spontaneous purchase.

After a listen to “The Colour of Spring” back in my dorm room in Zahm Hall, I was a convinced Talk Talk fan, and I’ve been ever since. Indeed, I’d never heard anything like the music or the lyrics.

In the opening track, Hollis sings with astounding conviction:

Try to teach my children/To recognise excuse before it acts/From love & conviction to pray.

In the concluding song, Hollis again brings in a religious theme--this time of the nature of evil, and the power of good to overcome it:

As bad as bad becomes/It's not a part of you/Contempt is ever breeding/Trapped in itself/Time it's time to live

With at least fifteen musicians and two choirs performing on the album, including Traffic’s venerable Steve Winwood, “The Colour of Spring” is complex, religious, and dramatic. It was made by musicians who clearly love what they do and who enter into music as fully as humanly possible. Even to this day, I feel chills when I hear the album. It’s not lost any of its quality, even after twenty-two years.

Two years later, in the fall of 1988, when I was working at as a classical host and a rock DJ at WSND-FM, Talk Talk released its fourth album, “The Spirit of Eden.” Now regarded as the foundation of the post-rock movement, the album might be one of the finest non-classical albums ever made. Intense, moody, and deeply meaningful, the “Spirit of Eden” captures and propels the imagination for a little over a 40 minutes. Costing an outrageous sum of money to produce, taking 14 months to make, and employing 16 musicians and a choir, the “Spirit of Eden” simply confused the music industry.

In a radio interview (available on the Talk Talk facebook page), Hollis acknowledged that the lyrics—based on the notion of creation and destruction, on the loss of real and traditional communities in the modern world, and on the disturbing absence of silence—have a profound meaning for him. In the middle of the opening 18-minute song, Hollis sings:

Summer bled of Eden/Easter's heir uncrowns/Another destiny lies leeched upon the ground.

Another song, “Wealth,” rewrites the famous “Prayer of St. Ignatius of Loyola.”

Talk Talk’s final album, “Laughing Stock,” has a similar feel to “Spirit of Eden,” in terms of music and lyrics. On the fifth track, “New Grass,” Hollis sings:

A hunger uncurbed by nature's calling/Seven sacraments to song/Versed in Christ/Should strength desert me. . . . Lifted up/Reflected in returning love you sing/Heaven waits/Someday Christendom may come/Westward.

*****

After twenty-two years, Talk Talk has released its first live DVD. Recorded July 11, 1986, in Montreaux, Switzerland,” the band—Mark Hollis, Lee Harris (drummer), Paul Webb (bassist), two keyboard players, and two percussionists—offers the small Swiss audience every single thing they have to offer over roughly 90 minutes. The concert, consisting of 15 songs (fourteen listed, but the best song by far, “Chameleon Day,” receives no official notice in the packaging) is nothing short of inspiring and heady, and the music—even the earlier poppier stuff—has an organic, impressionistic, jazzish, progressive feel.

Harris plays with such steady ferocity that I feared his drum kit might collapse during the concert. It didn’t, and Harris played with passionate verve throughout.

But, most importantly, Hollis sings as though he is standing before the court of God, afraid to squander any precious talent bestowed upon him. As strange as this might read, Hollis appears as though he is full ecstasy. I mean ecstasy in its original sense—not as something sexual, but as something divine. He seems the perfect medieval saint, enraptured by the Divine. There are moments during the concert when he walks back to a bench/seat in front of the drum kit and simply collapses. Yet, even in these down moments, he is fully and completely one with the music, if his body movements, swayings, and motions are any indication of the state of his soul. Indeed, from roughly the third song to the end, he seems to be completely immersed in the art and intensity of the music.

At the end of the concert, when Hollis says: “Thank you very much. Good night. God bless. Thank you very much,” he seems to mean every word of it.

[Originally published as “Mark Hollis in Ecstasy.” Because it’s April 5, 2011, I’ve decided to edit it and republish it here. And, I ask what I have asked for well over a decade: Mark Hollis, where art thou? The world could use an infusion of your unique beauty.]

A Platonic Kirk. Really, really Platonic.

2011-03-29T18:31:00.001-04:00

Transcribed by Brad Birzer; with a lot of help from Dragon Dictate for Mac 2.0

As that beautiful and intellectual force of nature, Annette Kirk, has mentioned in conversation many times, Russell was an Augustinian, and she was a Thomist. She was also more Aristotelian and he more Platonic.

In one of his most under-appreciated works (now, perhaps, more necessary to republish than ever), Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning (1978), Russell revealed--rather blatantly--his Platonic side.

What more can I write than ENJOY.

***

Every quote below is taken from Russell Kirk, “Identity, Images, and Education: 1977,” in Kirk, Decadence and Renewal in Higher Learning: An Episodic History of American University and College since 1953 (South Bend, Indiana: Gateway Editions, 1978), 220-233.

“Once we know who we are, and know that there are other real folk about us; once we understand that you and I are part of a community of souls—why, then it is possible to be fairly human, to live and die with dignity.” (pg. 223)

“For within every one of us two great conflicting impulses work. One of these is yearning to make one's self the center of the universe; the other, a yearning for the love and communion of fellow–beings new sentence and this contest ceases not until death.” (pg. 223)

“We cannot find our way in this world without images; for, as G. K. Chesterton tells us, all life is an allegory, and we can understand it only in parable.” (pg. 223)

“The saint is a human being who has put down his vanity: one who really does love his God with all his heart and soul, and his neighbor as himself. Still, it is not possible to know God was one person knows himself; one proceeds from microcosm to macrocosm, from little human image to transcendent reality. Not knowing themselves well, most of the votaries of Transcendental Meditation, in the 70s, could meditate only upon vacancy. Because you and I are God's utopia, self image is necessary.” (pg. 224)

“In other ages, one found one's self in one's tightknit family, one's tradition–governed close community, one's hopeful church, once meaningful work. Ellipses for most people, that sort of identity sufficed. More inquiring minds and consciences, indeed, sought for loftier images; and these were found in religious art and music, inhumane literature, in emulation of great and good men and women—living or dead.” (pg. 225)

“One parallel with our time is the age of Constantine, as described by Jacob Burckhardt. Life grows increasingly monotonous and impoverished; the old beliefs trickle away; even those in the seats of the mighty are course natures; the centralized state discourages and perhaps penalizes individual achievement; and increasingly the people ask themselves, is life worth living? Really, is it worth living? What are we doing here? (pp. 225-226)

“No longer is there need for awareness of one's own identity, it seems: one has but to conform to question and obey unquestioningly, the new commandments of the Savage God—who may be either political or transcendental; or else submit to the absurd routine prescribed by some jelly–like set of abstractions.” (pg. 226)

“In Aristotle's definition, a slave is a man who allows others to make his decisions for him.… The man who does not know himself still retains a soul, but that soul is blind and deaf and dumb.” (pg. 226)

“Once more mankind longs for signs and portends, from mystery and awe.” (pg. 227)

“Images are representations of mysteries, necessarily; from your words are tools that break in the hand, and it has not pleased God that man should be saved by logic, abstract reasoning, alone.” (pg. 229)

“The image, I repeat, can raise us on high, as did Dante's high dream; also it can draw us down to the abyss. It is a matter of the truth or the falsity of images. If we study good images and religion, and literature, and music, in the visual arts—why, the spirit is uplifted, and in some sense liberated from the tramples of the flesh. But if we submit ourselves (which is easy to do nowadays) to evil images—why, we become what we admire. Within limits, the will is free. It is imagery, rather than some narrowly deductive and inductive process, which gives us great poetry and scientific insights. When I write fiction, I do not commence with a well–concerted formal plot. Rather, there occurred to my imagination certain images, little seems, snatches of conversation, strong lines of prose. I patched together these fragments, retaining and embellishing the sound images, discarding the unsound, finding a continuity to join them. Presently I have a coherent narration, with some point to it. Unless one has this sort of pictorial imagery—Walter Scott Haddad in a high degree—he never will become a writer of good fiction, whatever may be said of his expository prose. And it is true great philosophy, before Plato and since him, that the enduring philosopher sees things in images initially.” (pg. 231)

“I have dreamed only one metaphysical dream in all my life—only one, at least that has lingered with me—but my little vision may serve to illustrate this point. Only a few years ago, I dreamed a brief dream of order. In this vision, I found myself sitting in what appeared to be a London club, conversing with my chance neighbors on the questions which puzzled Milton's Angels: fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute. In particular we talked of whether God is just in saving some souls and consuming others. Of a sudden, the lot of us—chairs and all—were transported in the twinkling of an eye to outer space, where we hung suspended between heaven and earth, after the fashion of Mohammed's coffin. The disputants and the chairs were the same, they're among the stars, but the room had changed. It was eight–cited now, and there were eight tall windows, each hinged in the middle. Through those windows we could see the stars and the blackness of infinite space. And we sensed that we were a maternity; that never would we be returned to things terrestrial. And we knew, without saying anything, that so long as we sat in our chairs, conversing, nothing would happen to us food and drink would appear at one's elbow, for the mere wishing. If we accepted these conditions, we were secure enough forever. But some of our number were impatient of restraint, whatever the penalty for breaking the rules of this peculiar club. Those unquiet spirits agreed to the Windows. Upon the slightest pressure, they hinged window–frames would swing outward, and those who leaned upon them were precipitated into the ghastly golf of empty space, self–annihilated; wailing they went, and were lost to us forever. As for me, I kept my chair, reflecting somewhat smugly, ‘My argument is vindicated. God does not damn anyone: those who destroy themselves do so from choice, refusing to accept the limitations of human existence.’ I do not contend that this is a brilliant image, but it did teach me something. From sources unknown and perhaps unknowable, such true visions come to us—greater images to those imaginations which are greater than mine.” (Pages 231–232).

[dictated with that nearly miraculous program, DRAGON DICTATE for Mac 2.0]

Kirk's Sorworth Place on NIGHT GALLERY, 1972

2011-03-29T11:49:00.000-04:00

I'm exhausted--emotionally and spiritually--from thinking about our arrogant, unconstitutional president and his absurd abuse of power in North Africa.

So, please consider this post a much needed break for all of us.

I came across this (below) yesterday evening and thought readers of TIC might interested.

In 1972, Rod Serling used Kirk's short story, "Sorworth Place," as a basis of an episode of NIGHT GALLERY.

The production values are terrible (though the Sorworth Place is set in the wilds of Scotland, you can see a California freeway in the background of an early shot) and the names aren't quite right. The characters are also a little too bizarre (but not in the right way--mostly from mediocre acting).

Still, through Serling's interpretation, important elements of Russell Kirk remain in this presentation. Enjoy.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/58781/night-gallery-the-miracle-at-camafeothe-ghost-of-sorworth-place

You need to advance roughly 21 minutes into the show to get to the Kirk story. The first story is pretty creepy as well, but it has nothing to do with Kirk.

Again, enjoy. And, Ralph Bain, RIP.

Reconstruction: Destruction of the Republic

2011-03-23T14:48:00.002-04:00

If TIC readers are interested in the American Civil War, please check out the latest issue of THE FREEMAN (expertly edited by Sheldon Richman).

The April 2011 issue includes articles by Jeff Hummel, Burton Folsom, Joe Stromberg, and yours truly.

http://www.thefreemanonline.org/featured/gaining-a-nation-losing-the-republic-reconstruction-1863–1877/

I'm happy as a clam about this (actually, growing up in Kansas, I have no idea if clams are really happy. Frankly, I'm skeptical). I've wanted to be published in the FREEMAN for nearly thirty years.

--BjB

Lovely and Loving Words

2011-01-21T22:50:00.001-05:00

There are few things so revealing of the mystery of the Incarnation as the discovery of our little words, strung together with soulful imagination. This young woman--a friend, to be sure--writes with elegance and grace. Read and savor.

http://breedinglilacs.wordpress.com/

Interview with Jeanne Hoffman (IHS)

2010-12-27T10:53:00.001-05:00

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of talking with IHS's Jeanne Hoffman, a person I respect immensely for her verve, dedication, and intelligence.

I also had the joy of working with the lovely and gifted Sarah Straw.

I've been involved with IHS for over two decades now, and I'm very proud of what they do for the cause of liberty and human dignity. I'm also honored to be part of their efforts.

http://www.kosmosonline.org/group-post/podcast-interview-dr-brad-birzer

Thank you, Jeanne, Sarah, and IHS!

Remembering St. Stephen and T.S. Eliot

2010-12-26T19:28:00.000-05:00

[originally published at catholicvote.org]

“Consider also one thing of which you have probably never thought. Not only do we at the feast of Christmas celebrate at once Our Lord’s Birth and His Death: but on the next day we celebrate the martyrdom of His first martyr, the blessed Stephen,” the archbishop preached in his Christmas morning homily, 1170AD.

“Is it an accident, do you think, that the day of the first martyr follows immediately the day of the Birth of Christ? By no means,” T.S. Eliot imagined the archbishop declaring to his flock.

Four days later, the king’s men butchered Thomas at Canterbury Cathedral, the archbishop’s aide, philosopher and theologian John of Salisbury witnessing the paradoxically horrific and holy moment.

“We mourn, for the sins of the world that has martyred them,” the archbishop stated that Christmas morning. “We rejoice, that another soul is numbered among the Saints in Heaven, for the glory of God and for the salvation of man.”

My high school English teacher first assigned this play to my class back in the spring of 1986. T.S. Eliot has been a constant companion ever since. The more I read about him, the more I like him. And, I can never think of this day without thinking of Eliot’s stunning Murder in the Cathedral.

How could one ever separate the birth of Christ, the Incarnate Word, without the future history of the church written by the blood of the martyrs, each a model of the sacrifice made on a Friday afternoon at 3?

But on this day, the second day of Christmas, we should remember not only St. Stephen and but also all who followed him—Perpetua, Felicity, Boniface, Thomas More, Maximilian Kolbe. . . and the many to come.

And, we should remember the many gifts of T.S. Eliot whose art made these blessed moments so real.

New Blogsite: Union and Confederate

2010-12-23T17:37:00.000-05:00

Dear Stormfields Readers,

First and foremost, Merry Christmas!

Second, if you're interested in American history or, specifically, the history of the American Civil War, please know that I've started a new website, Union and Confederate. It's meant to celebrate (not necessarily in a happy way) the 150th Anniversary of the most important tragedy to befall the republic.

The site still needs much work, and it's, of course, short on postings at the moment. But, aesthetics and content aside, it has begun!!!

http://unionandconfederate.blogspot.com/

Enjoy and God bless,
Brad