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Only Hellenism brings that which is without within, in her sciences, and that which is within without, in her arts.Hani Amir / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

This is me writing in May of 2003, in the build up to the last war on Islam – about which I was too much mistaken, alas. Some (or many) of the links may be broken by now. Meanwhile, I can see this much more clearly now: The Cautious strategy is aboriginal – and yet still very much like the “Instructions For Making Coffee Properly” procedure that was posted by the high-C in your office’s break-room. Hoplite civilization is Driven because fathers are Ds ex officio. So simple… A question for the very clever: Is this the string Marx was actually tugging on? –GSS
 

Intrepid weblogger Billy Beck pointed me to this ‘Why Do They Hate Us?’ piece by John Derbyshire in The New Criterion. I think Derbyshire was padding his thesis to a pre-set length; the article is long, rambling and unfocused. Funny in places, though. Like this:

Try to imagine that your own notion of life in the United States was constructed entirely from American movies and TV programs. You would perceive my country as being inhabited by a mix of gigantic, steroid-enhanced basketball stars, exquisitely beautiful young people with perfect teeth and musculature, gangsters, detectives, lawyers, and freakish pop singers. We live in palatial apartments, do very little work, sleep around a lot, and get our way mainly by murdering each other.

Beck was intrigued by a different part of the article, in which Derbyshire detailed an aborted engagement to speak before a party of Chinese media bigwigs who were visiting Washington just at the time of the World Trade Center attacks:

The Chinese media types came over on September 8th. They were in a room together with some State Department minders, receiving some kind of cultural acclimitization, when the World Trade Center was hit. There was a TV set in the room, and everyone got to see the second plane hit. When this happened, some of the Chinese party stood up and cheered.

We were told about (more…)

Yesterday, while the whole world was watching San Bernardino get shot to shit, I was showing off that baby picture to everyone I met.

Her name is Elizabeth Grace Trbovich, but I’ve thought of her simply as Grace since first I heard that name. She is the brand new daughter of my friends Mary Frances Cheney and Dan Michael Trbovich.

She was born on a day of turmoil, but every day is rife with turmoil if you focus on distant noises instead of the values that actually matter in your life.

I’m sad for the people in San Bernardino – including the attackers, who gave their lives for nothing. But I am graced by Grace, by the simple fact of her being.

I wrote this last night to Dan Michael:

I’ve been smiling all day, despite the TV news. A child is an anchor cast into the uncharted harbor of the future. She may be Grace, but she’s hope, too.

The future is a minute or a day or a month from now, but The Future begins on the day your child is born, since now you are striving for someone who will live for decades beyond your own demise.

It is reported that the San Bernardino inventors of Islamic Workplace Terrorism left behind a six-month-old infant – which argues to me that they did not believe in The Future. Sad for them, sad for us, saddest of all for their child.

But: Press on regardless. While the rest of America was watching carnage on TV all day yesterday, I was showing that baby picture to perfect strangers.

Why? Because goodness thrives, hard work pays off, hope springs eternal – and Grace abounds.

Q: If you came upon the Buddha in the guise of a hot dog vendor, what should you say?

A: Make me one with everything.

I love that joke today better than ever, since it provides the practical answer to this real-life question someone asked me:

May I ask what your take is on Zen?

I really like being asked questions, and I hope I don’t seem graceless or arrogant or too stupidly off-topic in my answers. Even so, my take on Zen Buddhism is that joke, since I know nothing else about it. That’s not entirely true. I know enough about Buddhism to get the joke – which is not quite nothing, but it’s close.

When I was a workaholic kid in Fun City, I would hear Alan Watts on WNEW-FM in the wee hours every Sunday morning – but I hated it all, especially Watts himself. In the world of internet radio – or even just preset buttons on boom boxes – I would never even have known his name. I don’t know that he actually knew anything about Zen Buddhism – and if he did, he was an awful ambassador – but I don’t remember anything he said, anyway.

Not that it would matter if I did. Doctrines abound, and my take is that all the other ones are wrong. People will always want to cherry-pick for notions they embrace, but a bogus map with pleasing flourishes is a bogus map. We know about Buddhists because of the Greek style of mind, not the other way around, and Buddhists thrive in the Greek world by being Greeks. Like Jews, like Catholics, like Mormons, Buddhists are religious at home and in church, living as ecumenical realists in the rest of the world.

And to there, I truly don’t care. I don’t admire undefended supernatural claims, but I don’t mind if you do – provided you behave appropriately toward me. I think every doctrine but mine is wrong – this with respect to uncontroverted ontological facts everyone else elects (more…)

Let’s start with a sad story:

Picture your own life at age three – but subtract the love.

How do I know there was a lot of love in your home? Because you can read me. I am tough sledding just as grammar, but I also frequently and intentionally put people through excruciating pain – like I’m doing right now. Only folks who learned deep emotional resilience in childhood can put up with me.

So go back to being an awakening child-mind, but take away all the interaction, all the conversation, all the shared events, all the affection – all the teasings and ticklings and snugglings – all the attention. One or both of your parents – or a grandparent or an older sibling – paid an enormous amount of attention to you when you were a baby, or, baby, you could not be here now.

Probably it was a lot of people: A couple or a few all the time, and many more now and then. And each one of those people was working – by intention or not – to cultivate your humanity. Virtually all children get at least minimally-adequate nurturance, since they are ultimately able to walk upright and to bathe nearly often enough. But those of us who are delighted to embrace the life of the mind – my way or any way – are beneficiaries of an enormous amount of attention we can never hope to repay.

So take all that away. What does your life look like to you? What does your future look like? Everyone is somewhere at the age of three. Had you been there then – tended to but never attended to – where would you be by now?

Why does fatherhood matter? Why does art matter? Why does empathy matter, for heaven’s sake? Yours is a cultivated mind. What you are today is what someone wanted for you to (more…)

It’s this simple: We will not defend what we have so long as we refuse to defend what we are: Rational egoists. We lose everything that matters to us because we twice betray what makes our lives work: We not only affect to deny our egoism, we fail to show our neighbors why it is the only possible source of human thriving. The change you’re looking for in the world can only come about when you resolve to live up to your own humanity – and help your neighbors live up to theirs.

You ain’t never been to a church like The Church of Splendor:

I sing the praises of The Clan Testudo – the adamantly father-headed home. If the goal of civilization is to thrive enduringly in civility, The Clan Testudo achieves that objective better and more-reliably than any other family configuration – this because it engenders civility from the inside out, from within the home, but also from within each person in that home.

There is no alternative to existential reality, so you will have played the hand you were dealt by your parents, but the folks who were dealt the best hands, overall, grew up in a Testudo home: Dad was the unchallenged moral leader – and his leadership was exemplary. Mom and Dad both had high expectations for the children, and they lived up to them – not alone because their parents shielded them from any awareness of alternative paths. The ideal was self-responsibility, and the children, in the main, grew up to be self-responsible parents – though, alas, not always Testudo parents.

That configuration, The Clan Testudo, is the modern expression of the Greek Hoplite’s freehold: The a-man’s-home-is-his-castle idea that precedes all of Western law. It was the union of Hoplite freeholders that gave birth to democracy in the first place, and that union was secured by the freeholder’s guarantee of autonomy – his liberty of action to manage his own affairs.

What makes the West the West is not democracy – nor any more-evolved states of rapacious predatory rent-seeking – but that Hoplite freehold. That family is our moral ideal – the source of all peace, of every plenty and of generation-after-generation of remarkable children. And the West falters and founders now precisely because we have systematically undermined the father-led home.

We make it easy for fathers to ditch their obligations to their children, and we make it easy for mothers to ditch their (more…)

The story behind every other story in the news is fatherhood.

Spree killers, as we’ve discussed, are tragically underfathered, as are their all-too-bloody blood-brothers, Islamic homicide-bombers. In between are the ever-petulant grievanchists and the criminals who are licensed by them to prey upon them – thus to aggravate ever-newer grievances. Even weather news turns out to be a story of fathering, in the way that the affected populations prepare for and respond to storm damage.

What makes news news is maledy – things got worse – and what makes maledy maledy is the absence of masculine virtue. Benedy – things got better – can be driven by a woman or a child, but only by deploying a man’s way of thinking: “We’ll get the job done now and we’ll cry about it later.” The worst of awful fates – the tornado leveled the town – is made benedic by men digging in to clean up and rebuild.

We prize those men in those moments – when we need them to fight and die for us, to rescue us, to pay our way – and none of the rest of the time. This is a mistake in every way I can think about it, but this is the way that is most consequential: The men who bring the most maledy to the news – the men who shoot themselves and other people, the men who blow themselves up in crowds of innocents – are the same men who are most neglected, most marginalized, most disposable in our culture.

But every man in the modern West is disposable. We raise our sons to be our useful tools. When we have used them up, we throw them away. How foolish of us to behave this way. How horrifying for them that they know it.

Everyone swears he wants to change the world, but the world is a distant place, best influenced, apparently, by heartfelt sentiment. When it comes to actually doing something (more…)

I’ve been hectoring Ayn Rand Institute Grand Poobah Yaron Brook for four months now, wondering why he will not rise to the defense of Ayn Rand’s atrocious utilitarian argument for abortion, now that the facts of that mass carnage are widely known.

His response so far? The same as that for all of libertarianism across its entire schismatic spectrum: Blank out.

But the quick answer to the question imposed by the headline is just that easy: Ayn Rand has almost no presence at Missouri or anywhere else because Ayn Rand’s followers kill their young, on her strident advice. Murray Rothbard’s minions, too, and all their minionettes. Libertarianism grows only by charismatic economics professors by now – which means it does not grow at all. Even religious libertarians deliver too little, too late, but the atheists end up being atomists by default. They are not represented on colleges campuses because they can’t be. The kids that could and should be there don’t exist.

Do you want to say, “So what? The Marxists don’t reproduce, either.” That’s true, but the Marxists take everyone else’s children from birth – by means of the anegoistic art parents ram down their children’s throats even before those kids are born. Rent-seeking academics short on charm crave carve-outs, but the problem at Missouri didn’t start last week – and the war to be fought with these kids as soldiers was won by Marxism long ago.

Ayn Rand’s explicit advice to young people on love, sex, marriage and family is parallel to the Marxist argument, so she cannot be represented to the #Mizzou-vians even by proxy. Her anti-family value structure is the same as theirs and that of the Marxist professoriate, so the fact that John and Dagny left all their little Galtlets at the abortuary doesn’t matter anyway.

Ayn Rand was right about a lot of interesting things, and interestingly wrong about others. But she was massively, irredeemably wrong about everything that matters to the fully-human life – the father-led family, the well-spring of all of human (more…)