So...
My name is Jonathan and I graduated from Texas A&M in 2002 with a degree in political science, UNC-Chapel Hill in 2004 with a degree in public administration, and am trying to earn a doctorate in communication. We'll see how that goes. My hobbies are reading and writing. My email is jonathanjones02 at gmail.
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Jonathan
Why Catholicism?
Catholicism is the antidote to the sort of nihilism that enjoys itself on the way to oblivion, where everything - us, life, love, beauty, truth, hardship, the currents of history - is really just a cosmic joke. Against the claim that nothing is really of consequence, Catholicism insists that everything is of consequence because everything has been redeemed by Christ.
A Religious Rule of Law
The debate between Protestants and Catholics primarily concerns authority: is it to be found ultimately in the Church or in the Bible? It would at first glance appear obviously clear that the Protestant answer is correct. The Bible, not an institution or its leaders, should be the believer’s guide in all things. One is then liberated from the arbitrary will of those holding ecclesiastical power.
This is deceiving, however, for the Bible does not plainly interpret itself. There is much that is not just verified but illuminated by a lively history, for Christianity is a religion that necessarily insists upon extraordinary historical claims. If someone, as his own “priest,” can enjoy direct access to the meaning of the text and the will of God absent the guidance of an authoritative body, what are believers to do when unsure of what the Bible means, or when there is sensible, intense, and important disagreement as to interpretation? The standard Protestant answer is that the Holy Spirit will lead the believer toward understanding. Then what criteria are there for determining exactly what the Spirit is saying, or whether He is actually speaking at all?
Here one must inevitably rely upon private judgment. The result, notoriously, has been the splintering of Protestantism into many denominations and subdenominations, not to mention heretical and semi-heretical sects. The Bible says whatever the individual thinks it says, regardless of how ill-educated or bigoted that believer might be and whatever extra-Biblical agenda may unconsciously tiptoe into its reading. Every man becomes, in theory and in practice, his own specialist. As a consequence, there is no real authority at all.
In this way, there is no rule of law in the religious sphere, only lawlessness: the majestic and objective will of God as enshrined in the Bible is in some way tainted by the stunted, subjective preference of the interpreter. The individual is free to establish an institution, thus creating a sphere within which to enforce a will. Such a sphere undermines valuable, valid links to the continuous past, allowing a new order from the ground up on the basis of nothing more than supposed insight. Every sectarian in history has set out to reinvent the theological wheel, promising that in these teachings we have, finally, a truer, more complete understanding of God. “Faith alone” by this approach is the underpinning of knowledge and salvation.
The Catholic view has for many centuries been that the preacher, theologian, or mystical visionary has a solemn duty to test claims against the light of historical reason and against the truths of Scripture. Further, Scripture must be understood, not according to the limited perspective of the reader, but within this light of reason and of the Tradition of which the Bible is the major part, a holy and complex body of teaching passed down from the apostles. Its contents are enlightened by an innumerable number of great figures, all as subject to these formidable spiritual workings as any other believer. The Catholic Church does not create but rather conserves and conveys. Change occurs infrequently, deliberately, gradually, minimally, and always to draw out the implications of what is present rather than introducing the novel and conceivably foreign element.
The authority of councils and popes is like the authority of the watchman guarding a museum whose works he could not have created and would not presume to tamper with. The teachings of a pope are never exactly his teachings. They are instead those of a temporary steward of a 2,000-year old institution. He must submit as dutifully as any of the faithful. Far from an unpredictable if pious administrator, he is the servant and executor of a system he did not make and cannot change. Dishonorable men have occupied the office. He will always lead a collection of sinners unworthy for forgiveness from a holy God. The key distinction of His organized worship is a rule of law, or rather its theological equivalent, at the core of Catholicism. And its rejection is the essence of Protestantism. Catholics believe Grace completes Nature; Protestants believe that Grace destroys Nature. For the Protestant, truth is essentially dialectical; it consists of abstract propositions to be stated, argued, and affirmed or denied. For the Catholic, however, truth, while it may be argued dialectically, is essentially something not to be argued but experienced. The truth is always linked with the mystery of the incarnation, and is therefore something to be encountered.
Interpretation
In Catholicism there is a mechanism for the application of fundamental principles and beliefs rooted in ancient and incomparable teachings to new circumstances - be they social, political, scientific or technological. For our benefit a broad (and not infrequently very difficult) collection of guidance is preserved most critically in the Bible. Even so, there is through the Catholic Church a basis for concluding “authenticity” far beyond asserting Lutheranism to be more accurately Christian than Calvinism, for example, or a particular view of an important theological subject more genuine, sensible, and religiously legitimate than another.
Protestants must at some point acknowledge the proposition that doctrinal differences are acceptable so long as the “essentials” of faith are right. Yet problems remain, namely which tenets are essential, as well as how they are to apply to a person and a community. There is in Protestantism no adequate defense mechanism against sacrilege. Teachers ever more devout and learned can be found on all sides of key interpretational disputes. The American landscape in particular is littered with houses of worship whose fortunes rise and fall with those of its founder or leader. Even as it is correct to focus on “Jesus as personal Lord and Savior,” it is not sufficient to combat the creeping of heresy.
Catholic theology rests on the authority enshrined to it by Christ to a small number of followers. Concerning Holy Scripture, it offers the most sensible and defensible interpretations of the Bible - the very Bible argued over and presented to believers and the outside world by Catholic bishops beginning in the third century after Christ and formalized more than one thousand years later at the Council of Trent. Consider the following, rich in their “Catholicity.” Christ made statements about the apostles having power to bind and loose (Matt. 16:18 and 18:18) and about their power to forgive sins (John 20:21-23). Further, many of the Catholic distinctions often under criticism are based in the taking of Scripture at face value. “Jesus said to them, ‘I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you’” (John 6:53); “This is my body . . .” (Luke 22:19); “I tell you the truth, unless a man is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5); “[D]on't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” (Rom. 6:3); “baptism . . . now saves you . . .” (1 Pet. 3:21); “If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven” (John 20:23); “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18).
Sola Fide & Sola Scriptura
It is beneficial to briefly examine two elementary doctrines of Protestantism: sola fide, the claim that we are saved by faith alone, and sola scriptura, the claim that Christians are to use only the Bible in matters of doctrine and practice. The first is problematic by virtue of passages in Scripture that contradict it. In Romans 2:7, for example, the Apostle Paul tells his readers that God will give the reward of eternal life to those who “seek after glory, honor, and immortality by perseverance in working good.” In Galatians 6:6-10, Paul tells his readers that those who “sow to the Spirit” by “doing good to all” will from the Spirit reap a harvest of eternal life. It is noteworthy that these verses are in Romans and Galatians, the very Epistles on which Protestants claim to base the doctrine of justification by faith alone.
These verses do not mean we earn our salvation by good works, a doctrine many mistakenly attribute to the Catholic Church. They do indicate, though, the “faith alone” formula is not an accurate description of what the Bible teaches about salvation. These passages reveal that, as a result of God's grace, we are capable of doing acts of love that please God. He then freely and undeservedly chooses to reward. One of the rewards, the primary reward, is the gift of eternal life (Rom. 2:6-7). Is it so outlandish to take seriously the very large claim that the Catholic Church is the direct inheritor of the apostles, those granted authority by Christ? Did not the Lord tell that small, carefully chosen community: “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth will be loose in heaven” (Matt. 16:19, Matt. 18:18)?
Consider also passages like Romans 3:28, where Paul says that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law. Paul was writing about the Mosaic Law in Romans and Galatians on the notion that it was not necessary to be circumcised to obtain salvation. What Paul writes is true: we are justified by faith apart from works of the Mosaic Law. This would be more obvious to English-speaking readers if translators used the Hebrew word for law, Torah, which is also the name of the first five books of the Bible. They contain the laws of Moses. Paul said, “We hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Torah” (Rom. 3:28). Looking at the very next verse proves this: “Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also” (Rom. 3:29).
If Paul did not mean “works of the Torah,” then this question and its answer would be meaningless. By the phrase “works of the Law,” Paul refers to something Jews have but Gentiles do not, the work of the Mosaic Law. He makes this point in the next verse: “Since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised [Jews] on the ground of their faith and the uncircumcised [Gentiles] through their faith” (Rom. 3:30). So the “works of the Law” Paul talks about in verse 28 are those works characterizing Jews, not Gentiles, the chief work being circumcision (3:29-30). The Jewish laws of circumcision, ritual purity, kosher dietary prescriptions, and the Jewish festal calendar are, now that we are under the New Covenant in Christ, irrelevant to our salvation. Keeping the ceremonial Law of Moses is not necessary for Christians. What is important is keeping “the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2), summarized as “faith working through love” (also translated as “faith made effective through love” [Gal. 5:6]). This is the work of the Church.
Luther inserted the word “alone” in his German translation of Romans 3, although he must have known the word “alone” was not in the Greek. Nowhere did the Holy Spirit ever inspire the writers of Scripture to say we’re saved by faith alone. Paul teaches in Galatians sinners are saved by faith working in love. This is the family way. A father doesn’t say to his children, “Since you're my family and all the other kids who are your friends aren’t, you don't have to work or obey; you don’t have to sacrifice because you’re saved. You're going to get the inheritance no matter what you do.” Sola fide and sola scriptura are not demonstrated by the Bible or by the Traditions highlighted by Paul in his Second Epistle to the Thessalonians. They are presuppositions.
Peterine Primacy
In Matthew 16 Christ says, “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church.” Protestants contend the rock on which the “church” was built is the revelation that Jesus is the Christ. Yet there is a structural feature in the text that requires Peter to be the rock. In Matthew 16:17-19, Jesus makes three statements to Peter: (a) “Blessed are you Simon Bar-Jonah,” (b) “You are Peter,” and (c) “I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.” The first statement is clearly a blessing, which magnifies Peter. Christ declares him blessed because he received a special revelation from God. He will further give the keys to the kingdom, also magnifying Peter.
As Christ's first and third statements to Peter are blessings, the middle statement, in its immediate context, is a blessing. In order to defend the view that Peter is not the rock on which the Church is built, one must appeal to a minor difference in the Greek text between the word used for Peter (petros) and the word used for rock (petra). According to the standard anti-Catholic interpretation, petros means “a small stone” while petra means “a large mass of rock;” and the statement “You are Peter (Petros)” should be interpreted as something that stresses Peter's insignificance. They picture Christ as having meant, “You are a small stone, Peter, but I will build my church on this great mass of rock which is the revelation of my identity.”
The problem with this interpretation is that while petros and petra did have these meanings in some Greek poetry, the distinction was gone by the first century when Matthew's Gospel was written. At that time the two words meant the same thing: a rock. Another problem is that when he addressed Peter, Jesus was not speaking Greek, but Aramaic, a cousin language of Hebrew. In Aramaic there is no difference between the two words that in Greek are rendered as petros and petra. They are both kepha; that's why Paul refers to Peter as Cephas (1 Cor. 15:5, Gal. 2:9). What Christ actually said was, “You are kepha and on this kepha I will build my church.” Yet even if the words petros and petra did have different meanings, the Protestant reading of two different “rocks” would still not fit the context. The second statement to Peter would be something that minimized or diminished him, pointing out his insignificance. Jesus would be saying, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, you are an insignificant pebble. Here are the keys to the kingdom of heaven.” Such a sequence of statements would have been not merely odd, but inexplicable.
Notice how the Lord's three statements to Peter had two parts. The second parts explain the first. The reason Peter was “blessed” was because “flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (v.17). The meaning of the name change, “You are rock,” is explained by the promise, “On this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (v.18). The purpose of the keys is explained by Jesus’ commission, “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (v.19). A careful reading of these three statements, paying attention to their immediate context and interrelatedness, demonstrates that Peter was the rock about which Jesus spoke. This is what an unbiased reader looking at the grammar and literary structure of the text should conclude.
If Peter is the rock, he was the head apostle. The Greek text reveals that Peter alone was singled out for this praise, and he alone was given the special authority symbolized by the keys of the kingdom of heaven. The other disciples of Jesus also shared in a more general sense Peter's authority of binding and loosing (Matt. 18:18). Yet if he was the head apostle, then once Christ had ascended into heaven Peter would have been the earthly head of the Church, subordinate to Christ's heavenly headship as the great lawgiver and sustainer of grace. He was the leader not only of believers in the capital of the Roman Empire, martyred by the mad tyrant Nero, but the founder of the community from which believers from all over the world took authoritative guidance. The practices of the Church today are a continuation of this crucial early Christian development.
The Sacramental
There is a sacramental principle found throughout the Bible. In both the Old and the New Testament there are incidents where God uses physical methods to convey grace. One striking example is the woman suffering hemorrhage. “When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, ‘If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.’ Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ ‘You see the people crowding against you,’ his disciples answered, ‘and yet you can ask, “Who touched me?”’ But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering’” (Mark 5:27-34).
This passage contains all the elements of sacramental principle: the woman's faith, the physical method (touching the clothes), and the supernatural power that went out from Jesus. When the woman came up to Him and with faith touched His garment, the power of God was sent forth and she was healed. This is how the sacraments work. God uses physical signs (water, oil, bread, wine, the laying on of hands) as vehicles of grace, which we receive in faith.
Another passage that highlights the sacramental manner in which God gives us His grace is 1 Peter 3:20-21. “God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also; not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a good conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” The meaning of Peter's statement, “baptism now saves you,” is clear from the context of the passage. He’s referring to the sacrament of water baptism, because he says eight people were “saved through water.” The merely physical effects of water in baptism are unimportant. What counts is the action of the Holy Spirit though baptism, as we “pledge . . . a good conscience toward God,” (that is, we make a baptismal pledge of repentance) and are saved “by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”
St. Thomas Aquinas writes we are not merely spiritual beings but physical creatures also. It is fitting for God to give us the gift of grace through the physical. Even Luther recognized this. In his Short Catechism, he states baptism “works the forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the devil, and grants eternal salvation to all who believe.” He ignored the Biblical evidence for five of the seven sacraments (retaining baptism and the Lord's Supper). Most Protestants lost even Luther’s view of the sacraments as a transfer of grace, departing from the Biblical teaching that “baptism now saves you.”
God sometimes gives saving grace apart from baptism (Acts 10), but He ordained the act of baptism. Peter told the crowd on the day of Pentecost, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). Paul was told at his baptism, “And now what are you waiting for? Get up, be baptized and wash your sins away, calling on his name” (Acts 22:16). It is right for worship to be anchored in these conduits of grace.
The Covenantal
Scripture presents God as a covenantal Creator. Catholicism, through the Sacraments, presents this truth more fully. Take as an example the Sacrament of Marriage. The marital act is not just a physical act; it’s a spiritual act that God has designed by which the marital covenant is renewed. And in all covenants there is opportunity for renewal, for the act of covenant rebirth is a moment of grace. Grace is life; grace is power; grace is God's own love.
From the marital covenant God has engineered the marital act to show the life-giving power of love. God has desired that when the two become one, they become one so that nine months later a name might be bestowed. The conceived child embodies the oneness God has made. He said as the earth was formed, “Let us make man in our image and likeness.” God, who is three in one, made man, male and female, and commended them to this union. The two do become one, a third gift of life in the family unit. They are, by the grace of God, three in one.
The Catholic Church is the lone Christian tradition on earth long insistent of this teaching, one beautifully revealed in Scripture. In the 1920s, revivalist polygamist movements spread like wildfire across Utah and continue strongly. In the 1930s, the Anglican Church began to allow contraception. Shortly thereafter, almost every mainline Protestant denomination caved in to the mounting pressure of the sexual revolution. By the 1970s, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America endorsed not only contraception and abortion on demand, but their federal funding. Even if others do not go quite that far, there is within Protestantism little stringency against the strong forces of human devaluation and in favor of the sanctity of life. This is an abomination.
Unyielding Christian truth, a strong pro-life stand and the long-held teaching that marriage is indissoluble – firmly against the prevailing winds of what is popular, even as most denominations are incapable of taking position on the most basic of moral issues – are signs the Catholic Church is founded upon ancient religious belief, the internalization of actual, supernatural events. There is solidity and consistency because the foundation is firm. Personal reconciliation of difficult but wholly orthodox Christian doctrine requires the subordination of sovereignty in judgment from the individual to the voice of Christ in the Church He founded.
In Protestantism the idea of covenant is understood as synonymous with contract. You give God your sin; He gives you Christ. Covenant, however, differs from a contract as marriage differs from prostitution. In a contract property is exchanged, whereas in a covenant persons are exchanged. In a contract individuals say, “This is yours and that is mine,” but Scripture shows how in a covenant one must say, “I am yours and you are mine.” When God makes a covenant with us, He says, “I will be your God and you will be my people.” ‘Am,’ the Hebrew word for people, literally means kinsman, family: I will be your God and father; you will be my family, my sons and my daughters, my household. Covenants form kinship bonds, which forges familial communion with God.
Christian covenant with Divinity signifies sonship. For Luther and much of Protestantism, God is a judge, the covenant a courtroom scene whereby all are guilty criminals. And since Christ endured punishment, righteousness is the exchange for sins. Many Protestants view salvation as not unlike legal maneuvering, the bargain of sin for Christ. But for Paul in Romans, for Paul in Galatians, salvation is much more. It isn't strictly an exchange afforded by the ultimate authority figure, as the covenant doesn't point to a courtroom so much as to a family room. God is not a detached judge; God is the Father who renders fatherly judgments. Christ is not just someone who represents an innocent victim under affliction for our penalty; He is the firstborn among all brethren. By this covenant Christ doesn't intervene only in a legal sense. He offers, by the chosen path of humanity, His own sonship so that we may become children of God through His righteousness.
Scripture
To return to the Protestant ideal of the Bible as the final, fundamental authority of Christian orthodoxy, there is the question of how we can know which books belong in the Bible. Certain books of the New Testament, such as the synoptic gospels, present reliable historical accounts of Jesus’ life, but there are a number of New Testament books (Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation) whose authorship and canonical status were debated in the early Church. And eventually it was the Church, a unified Christian association working under the Holy Spirit through councils, deciding in their favor and including them in the canon of inspired books. How may a person two thousand years removed from these writings have any possibility of proving them genuinely apostolic? It is simplistic yet little exaggeration to assert that all must take the Church’s word.
This is to say that for one vital Christian inquiry – the notion of what Scripture is – one must trust the Church (pre-schism communities under the direction of Rome). The key point is that there is no way to show from within Scripture itself what the books of the Bible should be. The “Bible only” theory is self-refuting. Scripture offers no indication of which books belong. The canon was not settled until many centuries after the last apostle died. And only one entity had the unquestioned authority to settle questions of divine inspiration. Until the temporal tensions of East and West Roman Empire and of European princes grasping for power tore Christian-based politics apart, remarkable theological concord was a rule of Christianity, not the exception. Rome played no small part in shaping and sheltering Scripture.
The Insufficient
It is not enough to belong to a church for habit, the worship service, or the pastor. These are easy, undemanding preferences. Belonging to a community beyond personal inclination, where authority is present, valid, and necessary, is a gift from God. This Church stands in marked contrast to a Presbyterianism far too easily a victim to fashionable cultural change, a Baptist tradition that defines itself by autonomy, resulting in considerable doctrinal distinctions, an Anglicanism teetering towards chaos and schism for homosexuality, or a Methodist form of worship inadvertently born of Wesley’s desire to reform, and stay within, Anglicanism. The Catholic Church was not created by a rejection, a reactionary definition set against; its authority comes from God, through His blessedly chosen representatives, not men and their preferences.
Protestant denominations are an association of like-minded Christians. They are human creations, a group gathered together to express, “we are a church.” No matter how strong the theological foundation, there remains a key reason for separation: teaching according to a certain way of belief (usually that of the pastor). The Church was meant to have unity in structure and faith, from the time Christ prayed for his followers to be one, and from the time Paul spread the seed of truth in his letters, writing that God’s household was “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone” (Eph. 2:20). There is little need for a mystical religious body if truths might be navigated through fracture-prone denominations and their leading personalities. Yet social customs and celebrity are hardly satisfactory for a more complete Christian life. And if a church body cannot claim to be critical for spiritual guidance, what need beyond material care is there for its existence? Should an institution teach the young in faith with authority, it must have authority in its very being.
The More Sufficient
There are, then, two options: congregationalism (in which each gathering of Christians filter and shape essentials) or Catholicism. The latter is based upon a divinely-charged principle of unity and time-tested historical validity. Congregationalism offers nothing like these two great strengths. The Councils of Nicaea are far more relevant to Christians today than the National Council of Churches. And now, as yesterday, only the Catholic Church imparts unity on a global scale. The alternative, through history to the present, is doctrinal chaos and disunity. When Protestants decided through private judgments which parts of the Catholic faith to keep and which to reject, did they intend for their successors to so vehemently and schismatically continue a process of revision, the results constantly codified as revealed truth?
The great guardian against Islamic invasion, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, declared that it is untenable for an ill-tempered, unbalanced, and unhappy monk to be right in his opinion while the whole of Christendom should be in error for well over a thousand years. The present inheritors of Luther, fewer and fewer of whom adhere to the church organized in his honor, are mired deep in the modern mental disease of assuming human intellect and insight only increase as eras fade. To wash the mind in Christian history is to be cleansed from the fractious existence of the church-shopping Protestant.
Since the excesses of the Reformation, the authority of the Catholic Church has been replaced by the arbitrary authority of schismatic individuals, and not infrequently for personal gain. In some once-Christian denominations, such as the Unitarians, the descent into confusion allowed for revealed truths to be eclipsed by the conviction there are no moral absolutes. More recently, absurd yet commercially successful theories of the end times and charismatic “word of faith” preachers test the edge of elementary Christian belief. The Church’s religious authority, when supplanted by personas, in due course devolves into an organized unit of the like-minded circling fads. The result is not simply believing differently yet remaining under God’s providence. Much of what has passed through the generations is a milieu Christian only in name and devoid of confidence in certainty and wisdom.
Catholicism is thus the most complete and vital form of Christianity. Despite its many human faults, the Catholic Church stands alone among assorted Christian societies as a truly global institution and the direct inheritor of Christ’s religious commands. It reflects the way He works, and spoke for more than one thousand years through the inevitable, shameful sins of Christian humanity as a unified voice. It still does, despite serious divisions among Christ’s followers. Nevertheless, God calls us to Him through the sacraments. There is no intimidating, authoritarian chain of command prompting self-consciousness among Catholic faithful about presenting a petition directly before Him or calling upon Him as Father. The Communion of the Saints, seen and unseen, enriches spiritual relationships. For if I try to relate on my own, of my own initiative, the bond is subject to my limitations. But if I relate to Him as part of a formal fellowship with other believers, founded by Christ, then my personal association is vastly expanded by that interaction. Such is the work of a universal Church.
G.K. Chesterton:
The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.
Grace and the Church:
Colossians 1:15-24 contains what may appropriately be called not only one of Paul's most profound and exalted Christological and ecclesiological teachings, but also one of his most illuminating insights on salvation. The passage forms, in my opinion, a cohesive whole, progressing from the supremacy and majesty of Christ (1:15), to his Lordship over creation as its Source and Maker (1:16-17), to His headship over His body on earth (1:18), to the specific members of the body (in this case, the Colossians) and their need to presevere in faith (1:21-23), to a single representative of the faith (Paul) who demonstrates the truest way of salvation: suffering with and in Christ (1:24). Using this hymn from Colossians as an outline, here is a biblical meditation on how Catholics understanding their salvation:
Jesus Christ, the image and manifestation of God (cf. Wis 7:26; John 1:1), is the cause of the cosmos and is King and Lord over it (cf. Mic 5:1-2; Is 9:6; Phil 2:9-11; Rev 17:14). He is the pre-existent One (cf. Prv 8:22), the Wisdom and operative hand of the invisible God, revealing His very nature and character to humanity (cf. Gen 1:1; Jn 1:1; Ps 33:6; Wis 7:22; Jn 14:8-11). He is before all things, with God from eternity (cf. Sir 34:3-5), the ultimate goal of the created order--all is ordered toward him alone. Even the highest and most splendid part of creation is nothing compared to his glory and power, for it is only by his word that it subsists and has being (John 1:2-3; Acts 17:28; Heb 2:10-11).
Christ is the head of his Church, the guarantor of redemption and truth (cf. 1 Tim 3:15). He is the source of its life and he exercises complete dominion over it (cf. Acts 3:14; Wis 9:1-2), yet the Church is united to him and has its being in him so that his fullness dwells within it. (cf. Eph 1:22-23; Acts 9:4-5). He has purchased his people with his own blood and flesh (Heb 2:14-15; 1 Pt 1:18-19), through his own body he is both sacrifice and high priest, offering eternal mediation on their behalf (1 Tim 2:4-5; Heb 2:17-18, 6:19-20). Christ has tasted the bitterest of sufferings, descending like a slave (Phil 2:7-8) into the hell of hopelessness only to preach to the dead so as to take them up with him when he was to be raised (1 Pt 3:18-22). Through his Resurrection as firstborn from the dead, the Church's members comprise a new humanity that is destined to rise with and in him (cf. 1 Cor 15:20; Acts 26:23). Christ is pre-eminent in creation and life, holding primacy over all things (cf. Sir 24:6)! Now, in the Church, his redemption fills all in all, the means for which humanity may be reconciled to God.
The Christian's old sinful ways are crucified and put to death. The Christian now is reconciled to God (Rom 8:5-11; 1 Cor 6:9-11; 2 Cor 5:18-19; Heb 12:26), to be offered in grace as a pure sacrifice in imitation of the Master (Rom 12:1; 1 Pt 2:22-25). The Christian is to be afflicted, becoming like Christ in death (Phil 3:10) so that Christ may be manifested in the flesh (2 Cor 4:10-11) and so that the Christian may be glorified (Rom 8:17). While the sacrifice of Christ on the cross is all sufficient for forgiveness and redemption (Heb 7:27, 9:12-26), the suffering of the Christian is the actualization and application of Christ's merit (Acts 14:22; 1 Thes 3:3-7).
The Christian must persevere, remaining unwavering in his conviction in order to obtain the salvation that is promised (Hab 2:4; Mark 13:13; Heb 10:36; Rom 11:22-23). Ultimately, the Chirstian must conform to Christ, participating in his sufferings in order to fully put to death the sins of the flesh and to live by the Spirit and inherit that which he is now heir to (cf. Rom 8:12-17; 2 Cor 1:5-7; Mt 5:11-12, 16:24). It is by the Holy Spirit that the Christian's sufferings are meaningful and redemptive (1 Cor 12:13-26), and through the same Spirit that the Christian is made a child of God (Rom 8:14-17).
The Christian is not saved by faith alone (Jas 2:14-26), but by grace alone (Eph 2:8-9) through a faith that is not mere belief, but through a faith that is completed by obedience (Rom 1:5, 16:26) and love (Gal 5:6), that is, by keeping the commandments of the Lord (Jn 15:6-10; Gal 5:17-21) and working out salvation in acts of charity and goodwill (Mt 25:31-46; Phil 2:12-13). Indeed, faith is never without works.
Salvation is only by Jesus the Lord, only through a commitment to faith by means of grace, and only through suffering in conformity with he who conquers death and desires to exult humanity within himself. To imitate Christ is to believe in the plan of God, to obey the plan of God and to act out the plan of God. To reject any aspect of this imitation as necessary for salvation is to reject the very Word that saves.
Catholicism is a cosmological religion - that is, one that integrates all the phenomena of space and time into a sacred order in which divine and human existence are continuous. For the Catholic, therefore, religion is not private and autonomous but communitarian and cosmic. In a cosmological religion, the central act of worship embodies in symbols the community's understanding of the nature of God and of existence. Both the religious symbols of Catholicism and the social behaviour of Catholics are outward signs of inner beliefs, the high altar and the large family equally eloquent about one's world view. The cult informs the culture and is inseparable from it. The Catholic perception of the liturgy was summed up long ago in the Latin saying, Lex Orandi, lex credendi.
A Religious Rule of Law
The debate between Protestants and Catholics primarily concerns authority: is it to be found ultimately in the Church or in the Bible? It would at first glance appear obviously clear that the Protestant answer is correct. The Bible, not an institution or its leaders, should be the believer’s guide in all things. One is then liberated from the arbitrary will of those holding ecclesiastical power.
This is deceiving, however, for the Bible does not plainly interpret itself. There is much that is not just verified but illuminated by a lively history, for Christianity is a religion that necessarily insists upon extraordinary historical claims. If someone, as his own “priest,” can enjoy direct access to the meaning of the text and the will of God absent the guidance of an authoritative body, what are believers to do when unsure of what the Bible means, or when there is sensible, intense, and important disagreement as to interpretation? The standard Protestant answer is that the Holy Spirit will lead the believer toward understanding. Then what criteria are there for determining exactly what the Spirit is saying, or whether He is actually speaking at all?
Here one must inevitably rely upon private judgment. The result, notoriously, has been the splintering of Protestantism into many denominations and subdenominations, not to mention heretical and semi-heretical sects. The Bible says whatever the individual thinks it says, regardless of how ill-educated or bigoted that believer might be and whatever extra-Biblical agenda may unconsciously tiptoe into its reading. Every man becomes, in theory and in practice, his own specialist. As a consequence, there is no real authority at all.
In this way, there is no rule of law in the religious sphere, only lawlessness: the majestic and objective will of God as enshrined in the Bible is in some way tainted by the stunted, subjective preference of the interpreter. The individual is free to establish an institution, thus creating a sphere within which to enforce a will. Such a sphere undermines valuable, valid links to the continuous past, allowing a new order from the ground up on the basis of nothing more than supposed insight. Every sectarian in history has set out to reinvent the theological wheel, promising that in these teachings we have, finally, a truer, more complete understanding of God. “Faith alone” by this approach is the underpinning of knowledge and salvation.
The Catholic view has for many centuries been that the preacher, theologian, or mystical visionary has a solemn duty to test claims against the light of historical reason and against the truths of Scripture. Further, Scripture must be understood, not according to the limited perspective of the reader, but within this light of reason and of the Tradition of which the Bible is the major part, a holy and complex body of teaching passed down from the apostles. Its contents are enlightened by an innumerable number of great figures, all as subject to these formidable spiritual workings as any other believer. The Catholic Church does not create but rather conserves and conveys. Change occurs infrequently, deliberately, gradually, minimally, and always to draw out the implications of what is present rather than introducing the novel and conceivably foreign element.
The authority of councils and popes is like the authority of the watchman guarding a museum whose works he could not have created and would not presume to tamper with. The teachings of a pope are never exactly his teachings. They are instead those of a temporary steward of a 2,000-year old institution. He must submit as dutifully as any of the faithful. Far from an unpredictable if pious administrator, he is the servant and executor of a system he did not make and cannot change. Dishonorable men have occupied the office. He will always lead a collection of sinners unworthy for forgiveness from a holy God. The key distinction of His organized worship is a rule of law, or rather its theological equivalent, at the core of Catholicism. And its rejection is the essence of Protestantism. Catholics believe Grace completes Nature; Protestants believe that Grace destroys Nature. For the Protestant, truth is essentially dialectical; it consists of abstract propositions to be stated, argued, and affirmed or denied. For the Catholic, however, truth, while it may be argued dialectically, is essentially something not to be argued but experienced. The truth is always linked with the mystery of the incarnation, and is therefore something to be encountered.
Interpretation
In Catholicism there is a mechanism for the application of fundamental principles and beliefs rooted in ancient and incomparable teachings to new circumstances - be they social, political, scientific or technological. For our benefit a broad (and not infrequently very difficult) collection of guidance is preserved most critically in the Bible. Even so, there is through the Catholic Church a basis for concluding “authenticity” far beyond asserting Lutheranism to be more accurately Christian than Calvinism, for example, or a particular view of an important theological subject more genuine, sensible, and religiously legitimate than another.
Protestants must at some point acknowledge the proposition that doctrinal differences are acceptable so long as the “essentials” of faith are right. Yet problems remain, namely which tenets are essential, as well as how they are to apply to a person and a community. There is in Protestantism no adequate defense mechanism against sacrilege. Teachers ever more devout and learned can be found on all sides of key interpretational disputes. The American landscape in particular is littered with houses of worship whose fortunes rise and fall with those of its founder or leader. Even as it is correct to focus on “Jesus as personal Lord and Savior,” it is not sufficient to combat the creeping of heresy.
Catholic theology rests on the authority enshrined to it by Christ to a small number of followers. Concerning Holy Scripture, it offers the most sensible and defensible interpretations of the Bible - the very Bible argued over and presented to believers and the outside world by Catholic bishops beginning in the third century after Christ and formalized more than one thousand years later at the Council of Trent. Consider the following, rich in their “Catholicity.” Christ made statements about the apostles having power to bind and loose (Matt. 16:18 and 18:18) and about their power to forgive sins (John 20:21-23). Further, many of the Catholic distinctions often under criticism are based in the taking of Scripture at face value. “Jesus said to them, ‘I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you’” (John 6:53); “This is my body . . .” (Luke 22:19); “I tell you the truth, unless a man is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (John 3:5); “[D]on't you know that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” (Rom. 6:3); “baptism . . . now saves you . . .” (1 Pet. 3:21); “If you forgive anyone his sins, they are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven” (John 20:23); “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18).
Sola Fide & Sola Scriptura
It is beneficial to briefly examine two elementary doctrines of Protestantism: sola fide, the claim that we are saved by faith alone, and sola scriptura, the claim that Christians are to use only the Bible in matters of doctrine and practice. The first is problematic by virtue of passages in Scripture that contradict it. In Romans 2:7, for example, the Apostle Paul tells his readers that God will give the reward of eternal life to those who “seek after glory, honor, and immortality by perseverance in working good.” In Galatians 6:6-10, Paul tells his readers that those who “sow to the Spirit” by “doing good to all” will from the Spirit reap a harvest of eternal life. It is noteworthy that these verses are in Romans and Galatians, the very Epistles on which Protestants claim to base the doctrine of justification by faith alone.
These verses do not mean we earn our salvation by good works, a doctrine many mistakenly attribute to the Catholic Church. They do indicate, though, the “faith alone” formula is not an accurate description of what the Bible teaches about salvation. These passages reveal that, as a result of God's grace, we are capable of doing acts of love that please God. He then freely and undeservedly chooses to reward. One of the rewards, the primary reward, is the gift of eternal life (Rom. 2:6-7). Is it so outlandish to take seriously the very large claim that the Catholic Church is the direct inheritor of the apostles, those granted authority by Christ? Did not the Lord tell that small, carefully chosen community: “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth will be loose in heaven” (Matt. 16:19, Matt. 18:18)?
Consider also passages like Romans 3:28, where Paul says that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Law. Paul was writing about the Mosaic Law in Romans and Galatians on the notion that it was not necessary to be circumcised to obtain salvation. What Paul writes is true: we are justified by faith apart from works of the Mosaic Law. This would be more obvious to English-speaking readers if translators used the Hebrew word for law, Torah, which is also the name of the first five books of the Bible. They contain the laws of Moses. Paul said, “We hold that a man is justified by faith apart from works of the Torah” (Rom. 3:28). Looking at the very next verse proves this: “Or is God the God of Jews only? Is he not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also” (Rom. 3:29).
If Paul did not mean “works of the Torah,” then this question and its answer would be meaningless. By the phrase “works of the Law,” Paul refers to something Jews have but Gentiles do not, the work of the Mosaic Law. He makes this point in the next verse: “Since God is one; and he will justify the circumcised [Jews] on the ground of their faith and the uncircumcised [Gentiles] through their faith” (Rom. 3:30). So the “works of the Law” Paul talks about in verse 28 are those works characterizing Jews, not Gentiles, the chief work being circumcision (3:29-30). The Jewish laws of circumcision, ritual purity, kosher dietary prescriptions, and the Jewish festal calendar are, now that we are under the New Covenant in Christ, irrelevant to our salvation. Keeping the ceremonial Law of Moses is not necessary for Christians. What is important is keeping “the law of Christ” (Gal. 6:2), summarized as “faith working through love” (also translated as “faith made effective through love” [Gal. 5:6]). This is the work of the Church.
Luther inserted the word “alone” in his German translation of Romans 3, although he must have known the word “alone” was not in the Greek. Nowhere did the Holy Spirit ever inspire the writers of Scripture to say we’re saved by faith alone. Paul teaches in Galatians sinners are saved by faith working in love. This is the family way. A father doesn’t say to his children, “Since you're my family and all the other kids who are your friends aren’t, you don't have to work or obey; you don’t have to sacrifice because you’re saved. You're going to get the inheritance no matter what you do.” Sola fide and sola scriptura are not demonstrated by the Bible or by the Traditions highlighted by Paul in his Second Epistle to the Thessalonians. They are presuppositions.
Peterine Primacy
In Matthew 16 Christ says, “You are Peter and on this rock I will build my church.” Protestants contend the rock on which the “church” was built is the revelation that Jesus is the Christ. Yet there is a structural feature in the text that requires Peter to be the rock. In Matthew 16:17-19, Jesus makes three statements to Peter: (a) “Blessed are you Simon Bar-Jonah,” (b) “You are Peter,” and (c) “I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven.” The first statement is clearly a blessing, which magnifies Peter. Christ declares him blessed because he received a special revelation from God. He will further give the keys to the kingdom, also magnifying Peter.
As Christ's first and third statements to Peter are blessings, the middle statement, in its immediate context, is a blessing. In order to defend the view that Peter is not the rock on which the Church is built, one must appeal to a minor difference in the Greek text between the word used for Peter (petros) and the word used for rock (petra). According to the standard anti-Catholic interpretation, petros means “a small stone” while petra means “a large mass of rock;” and the statement “You are Peter (Petros)” should be interpreted as something that stresses Peter's insignificance. They picture Christ as having meant, “You are a small stone, Peter, but I will build my church on this great mass of rock which is the revelation of my identity.”
The problem with this interpretation is that while petros and petra did have these meanings in some Greek poetry, the distinction was gone by the first century when Matthew's Gospel was written. At that time the two words meant the same thing: a rock. Another problem is that when he addressed Peter, Jesus was not speaking Greek, but Aramaic, a cousin language of Hebrew. In Aramaic there is no difference between the two words that in Greek are rendered as petros and petra. They are both kepha; that's why Paul refers to Peter as Cephas (1 Cor. 15:5, Gal. 2:9). What Christ actually said was, “You are kepha and on this kepha I will build my church.” Yet even if the words petros and petra did have different meanings, the Protestant reading of two different “rocks” would still not fit the context. The second statement to Peter would be something that minimized or diminished him, pointing out his insignificance. Jesus would be saying, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah, you are an insignificant pebble. Here are the keys to the kingdom of heaven.” Such a sequence of statements would have been not merely odd, but inexplicable.
Notice how the Lord's three statements to Peter had two parts. The second parts explain the first. The reason Peter was “blessed” was because “flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven” (v.17). The meaning of the name change, “You are rock,” is explained by the promise, “On this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (v.18). The purpose of the keys is explained by Jesus’ commission, “Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven” (v.19). A careful reading of these three statements, paying attention to their immediate context and interrelatedness, demonstrates that Peter was the rock about which Jesus spoke. This is what an unbiased reader looking at the grammar and literary structure of the text should conclude.
If Peter is the rock, he was the head apostle. The Greek text reveals that Peter alone was singled out for this praise, and he alone was given the special authority symbolized by the keys of the kingdom of heaven. The other disciples of Jesus also shared in a more general sense Peter's authority of binding and loosing (Matt. 18:18). Yet if he was the head apostle, then once Christ had ascended into heaven Peter would have been the earthly head of the Church, subordinate to Christ's heavenly headship as the great lawgiver and sustainer of grace. He was the leader not only of believers in the capital of the Roman Empire, martyred by the mad tyrant Nero, but the founder of the community from which believers from all over the world took authoritative guidance. The practices of the Church today are a continuation of this crucial early Christian development.
The Sacramental
There is a sacramental principle found throughout the Bible. In both the Old and the New Testament there are incidents where God uses physical methods to convey grace. One striking example is the woman suffering hemorrhage. “When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, ‘If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.’ Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ ‘You see the people crowding against you,’ his disciples answered, ‘and yet you can ask, “Who touched me?”’ But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering’” (Mark 5:27-34).
This passage contains all the elements of sacramental principle: the woman's faith, the physical method (touching the clothes), and the supernatural power that went out from Jesus. When the woman came up to Him and with faith touched His garment, the power of God was sent forth and she was healed. This is how the sacraments work. God uses physical signs (water, oil, bread, wine, the laying on of hands) as vehicles of grace, which we receive in faith.
Another passage that highlights the sacramental manner in which God gives us His grace is 1 Peter 3:20-21. “God waited patiently in the days of Noah while the ark was being built. In it only a few people, eight in all, were saved through water, and this water symbolizes baptism that now saves you also; not the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a good conscience toward God. It saves you by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.” The meaning of Peter's statement, “baptism now saves you,” is clear from the context of the passage. He’s referring to the sacrament of water baptism, because he says eight people were “saved through water.” The merely physical effects of water in baptism are unimportant. What counts is the action of the Holy Spirit though baptism, as we “pledge . . . a good conscience toward God,” (that is, we make a baptismal pledge of repentance) and are saved “by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”
St. Thomas Aquinas writes we are not merely spiritual beings but physical creatures also. It is fitting for God to give us the gift of grace through the physical. Even Luther recognized this. In his Short Catechism, he states baptism “works the forgiveness of sins, delivers from death and the devil, and grants eternal salvation to all who believe.” He ignored the Biblical evidence for five of the seven sacraments (retaining baptism and the Lord's Supper). Most Protestants lost even Luther’s view of the sacraments as a transfer of grace, departing from the Biblical teaching that “baptism now saves you.”
God sometimes gives saving grace apart from baptism (Acts 10), but He ordained the act of baptism. Peter told the crowd on the day of Pentecost, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:38). Paul was told at his baptism, “And now what are you waiting for? Get up, be baptized and wash your sins away, calling on his name” (Acts 22:16). It is right for worship to be anchored in these conduits of grace.
The Covenantal
Scripture presents God as a covenantal Creator. Catholicism, through the Sacraments, presents this truth more fully. Take as an example the Sacrament of Marriage. The marital act is not just a physical act; it’s a spiritual act that God has designed by which the marital covenant is renewed. And in all covenants there is opportunity for renewal, for the act of covenant rebirth is a moment of grace. Grace is life; grace is power; grace is God's own love.
From the marital covenant God has engineered the marital act to show the life-giving power of love. God has desired that when the two become one, they become one so that nine months later a name might be bestowed. The conceived child embodies the oneness God has made. He said as the earth was formed, “Let us make man in our image and likeness.” God, who is three in one, made man, male and female, and commended them to this union. The two do become one, a third gift of life in the family unit. They are, by the grace of God, three in one.
The Catholic Church is the lone Christian tradition on earth long insistent of this teaching, one beautifully revealed in Scripture. In the 1920s, revivalist polygamist movements spread like wildfire across Utah and continue strongly. In the 1930s, the Anglican Church began to allow contraception. Shortly thereafter, almost every mainline Protestant denomination caved in to the mounting pressure of the sexual revolution. By the 1970s, the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America endorsed not only contraception and abortion on demand, but their federal funding. Even if others do not go quite that far, there is within Protestantism little stringency against the strong forces of human devaluation and in favor of the sanctity of life. This is an abomination.
Unyielding Christian truth, a strong pro-life stand and the long-held teaching that marriage is indissoluble – firmly against the prevailing winds of what is popular, even as most denominations are incapable of taking position on the most basic of moral issues – are signs the Catholic Church is founded upon ancient religious belief, the internalization of actual, supernatural events. There is solidity and consistency because the foundation is firm. Personal reconciliation of difficult but wholly orthodox Christian doctrine requires the subordination of sovereignty in judgment from the individual to the voice of Christ in the Church He founded.
In Protestantism the idea of covenant is understood as synonymous with contract. You give God your sin; He gives you Christ. Covenant, however, differs from a contract as marriage differs from prostitution. In a contract property is exchanged, whereas in a covenant persons are exchanged. In a contract individuals say, “This is yours and that is mine,” but Scripture shows how in a covenant one must say, “I am yours and you are mine.” When God makes a covenant with us, He says, “I will be your God and you will be my people.” ‘Am,’ the Hebrew word for people, literally means kinsman, family: I will be your God and father; you will be my family, my sons and my daughters, my household. Covenants form kinship bonds, which forges familial communion with God.
Christian covenant with Divinity signifies sonship. For Luther and much of Protestantism, God is a judge, the covenant a courtroom scene whereby all are guilty criminals. And since Christ endured punishment, righteousness is the exchange for sins. Many Protestants view salvation as not unlike legal maneuvering, the bargain of sin for Christ. But for Paul in Romans, for Paul in Galatians, salvation is much more. It isn't strictly an exchange afforded by the ultimate authority figure, as the covenant doesn't point to a courtroom so much as to a family room. God is not a detached judge; God is the Father who renders fatherly judgments. Christ is not just someone who represents an innocent victim under affliction for our penalty; He is the firstborn among all brethren. By this covenant Christ doesn't intervene only in a legal sense. He offers, by the chosen path of humanity, His own sonship so that we may become children of God through His righteousness.
Scripture
To return to the Protestant ideal of the Bible as the final, fundamental authority of Christian orthodoxy, there is the question of how we can know which books belong in the Bible. Certain books of the New Testament, such as the synoptic gospels, present reliable historical accounts of Jesus’ life, but there are a number of New Testament books (Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation) whose authorship and canonical status were debated in the early Church. And eventually it was the Church, a unified Christian association working under the Holy Spirit through councils, deciding in their favor and including them in the canon of inspired books. How may a person two thousand years removed from these writings have any possibility of proving them genuinely apostolic? It is simplistic yet little exaggeration to assert that all must take the Church’s word.
This is to say that for one vital Christian inquiry – the notion of what Scripture is – one must trust the Church (pre-schism communities under the direction of Rome). The key point is that there is no way to show from within Scripture itself what the books of the Bible should be. The “Bible only” theory is self-refuting. Scripture offers no indication of which books belong. The canon was not settled until many centuries after the last apostle died. And only one entity had the unquestioned authority to settle questions of divine inspiration. Until the temporal tensions of East and West Roman Empire and of European princes grasping for power tore Christian-based politics apart, remarkable theological concord was a rule of Christianity, not the exception. Rome played no small part in shaping and sheltering Scripture.
The Insufficient
It is not enough to belong to a church for habit, the worship service, or the pastor. These are easy, undemanding preferences. Belonging to a community beyond personal inclination, where authority is present, valid, and necessary, is a gift from God. This Church stands in marked contrast to a Presbyterianism far too easily a victim to fashionable cultural change, a Baptist tradition that defines itself by autonomy, resulting in considerable doctrinal distinctions, an Anglicanism teetering towards chaos and schism for homosexuality, or a Methodist form of worship inadvertently born of Wesley’s desire to reform, and stay within, Anglicanism. The Catholic Church was not created by a rejection, a reactionary definition set against; its authority comes from God, through His blessedly chosen representatives, not men and their preferences.
Protestant denominations are an association of like-minded Christians. They are human creations, a group gathered together to express, “we are a church.” No matter how strong the theological foundation, there remains a key reason for separation: teaching according to a certain way of belief (usually that of the pastor). The Church was meant to have unity in structure and faith, from the time Christ prayed for his followers to be one, and from the time Paul spread the seed of truth in his letters, writing that God’s household was “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone” (Eph. 2:20). There is little need for a mystical religious body if truths might be navigated through fracture-prone denominations and their leading personalities. Yet social customs and celebrity are hardly satisfactory for a more complete Christian life. And if a church body cannot claim to be critical for spiritual guidance, what need beyond material care is there for its existence? Should an institution teach the young in faith with authority, it must have authority in its very being.
The More Sufficient
There are, then, two options: congregationalism (in which each gathering of Christians filter and shape essentials) or Catholicism. The latter is based upon a divinely-charged principle of unity and time-tested historical validity. Congregationalism offers nothing like these two great strengths. The Councils of Nicaea are far more relevant to Christians today than the National Council of Churches. And now, as yesterday, only the Catholic Church imparts unity on a global scale. The alternative, through history to the present, is doctrinal chaos and disunity. When Protestants decided through private judgments which parts of the Catholic faith to keep and which to reject, did they intend for their successors to so vehemently and schismatically continue a process of revision, the results constantly codified as revealed truth?
The great guardian against Islamic invasion, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, declared that it is untenable for an ill-tempered, unbalanced, and unhappy monk to be right in his opinion while the whole of Christendom should be in error for well over a thousand years. The present inheritors of Luther, fewer and fewer of whom adhere to the church organized in his honor, are mired deep in the modern mental disease of assuming human intellect and insight only increase as eras fade. To wash the mind in Christian history is to be cleansed from the fractious existence of the church-shopping Protestant.
Since the excesses of the Reformation, the authority of the Catholic Church has been replaced by the arbitrary authority of schismatic individuals, and not infrequently for personal gain. In some once-Christian denominations, such as the Unitarians, the descent into confusion allowed for revealed truths to be eclipsed by the conviction there are no moral absolutes. More recently, absurd yet commercially successful theories of the end times and charismatic “word of faith” preachers test the edge of elementary Christian belief. The Church’s religious authority, when supplanted by personas, in due course devolves into an organized unit of the like-minded circling fads. The result is not simply believing differently yet remaining under God’s providence. Much of what has passed through the generations is a milieu Christian only in name and devoid of confidence in certainty and wisdom.
Catholicism is thus the most complete and vital form of Christianity. Despite its many human faults, the Catholic Church stands alone among assorted Christian societies as a truly global institution and the direct inheritor of Christ’s religious commands. It reflects the way He works, and spoke for more than one thousand years through the inevitable, shameful sins of Christian humanity as a unified voice. It still does, despite serious divisions among Christ’s followers. Nevertheless, God calls us to Him through the sacraments. There is no intimidating, authoritarian chain of command prompting self-consciousness among Catholic faithful about presenting a petition directly before Him or calling upon Him as Father. The Communion of the Saints, seen and unseen, enriches spiritual relationships. For if I try to relate on my own, of my own initiative, the bond is subject to my limitations. But if I relate to Him as part of a formal fellowship with other believers, founded by Christ, then my personal association is vastly expanded by that interaction. Such is the work of a universal Church.
G.K. Chesterton:
The Catholic Church is the only thing which saves a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age.
Grace and the Church:
Colossians 1:15-24 contains what may appropriately be called not only one of Paul's most profound and exalted Christological and ecclesiological teachings, but also one of his most illuminating insights on salvation. The passage forms, in my opinion, a cohesive whole, progressing from the supremacy and majesty of Christ (1:15), to his Lordship over creation as its Source and Maker (1:16-17), to His headship over His body on earth (1:18), to the specific members of the body (in this case, the Colossians) and their need to presevere in faith (1:21-23), to a single representative of the faith (Paul) who demonstrates the truest way of salvation: suffering with and in Christ (1:24). Using this hymn from Colossians as an outline, here is a biblical meditation on how Catholics understanding their salvation:
Jesus Christ, the image and manifestation of God (cf. Wis 7:26; John 1:1), is the cause of the cosmos and is King and Lord over it (cf. Mic 5:1-2; Is 9:6; Phil 2:9-11; Rev 17:14). He is the pre-existent One (cf. Prv 8:22), the Wisdom and operative hand of the invisible God, revealing His very nature and character to humanity (cf. Gen 1:1; Jn 1:1; Ps 33:6; Wis 7:22; Jn 14:8-11). He is before all things, with God from eternity (cf. Sir 34:3-5), the ultimate goal of the created order--all is ordered toward him alone. Even the highest and most splendid part of creation is nothing compared to his glory and power, for it is only by his word that it subsists and has being (John 1:2-3; Acts 17:28; Heb 2:10-11).
Christ is the head of his Church, the guarantor of redemption and truth (cf. 1 Tim 3:15). He is the source of its life and he exercises complete dominion over it (cf. Acts 3:14; Wis 9:1-2), yet the Church is united to him and has its being in him so that his fullness dwells within it. (cf. Eph 1:22-23; Acts 9:4-5). He has purchased his people with his own blood and flesh (Heb 2:14-15; 1 Pt 1:18-19), through his own body he is both sacrifice and high priest, offering eternal mediation on their behalf (1 Tim 2:4-5; Heb 2:17-18, 6:19-20). Christ has tasted the bitterest of sufferings, descending like a slave (Phil 2:7-8) into the hell of hopelessness only to preach to the dead so as to take them up with him when he was to be raised (1 Pt 3:18-22). Through his Resurrection as firstborn from the dead, the Church's members comprise a new humanity that is destined to rise with and in him (cf. 1 Cor 15:20; Acts 26:23). Christ is pre-eminent in creation and life, holding primacy over all things (cf. Sir 24:6)! Now, in the Church, his redemption fills all in all, the means for which humanity may be reconciled to God.
The Christian's old sinful ways are crucified and put to death. The Christian now is reconciled to God (Rom 8:5-11; 1 Cor 6:9-11; 2 Cor 5:18-19; Heb 12:26), to be offered in grace as a pure sacrifice in imitation of the Master (Rom 12:1; 1 Pt 2:22-25). The Christian is to be afflicted, becoming like Christ in death (Phil 3:10) so that Christ may be manifested in the flesh (2 Cor 4:10-11) and so that the Christian may be glorified (Rom 8:17). While the sacrifice of Christ on the cross is all sufficient for forgiveness and redemption (Heb 7:27, 9:12-26), the suffering of the Christian is the actualization and application of Christ's merit (Acts 14:22; 1 Thes 3:3-7).
The Christian must persevere, remaining unwavering in his conviction in order to obtain the salvation that is promised (Hab 2:4; Mark 13:13; Heb 10:36; Rom 11:22-23). Ultimately, the Chirstian must conform to Christ, participating in his sufferings in order to fully put to death the sins of the flesh and to live by the Spirit and inherit that which he is now heir to (cf. Rom 8:12-17; 2 Cor 1:5-7; Mt 5:11-12, 16:24). It is by the Holy Spirit that the Christian's sufferings are meaningful and redemptive (1 Cor 12:13-26), and through the same Spirit that the Christian is made a child of God (Rom 8:14-17).
The Christian is not saved by faith alone (Jas 2:14-26), but by grace alone (Eph 2:8-9) through a faith that is not mere belief, but through a faith that is completed by obedience (Rom 1:5, 16:26) and love (Gal 5:6), that is, by keeping the commandments of the Lord (Jn 15:6-10; Gal 5:17-21) and working out salvation in acts of charity and goodwill (Mt 25:31-46; Phil 2:12-13). Indeed, faith is never without works.
Salvation is only by Jesus the Lord, only through a commitment to faith by means of grace, and only through suffering in conformity with he who conquers death and desires to exult humanity within himself. To imitate Christ is to believe in the plan of God, to obey the plan of God and to act out the plan of God. To reject any aspect of this imitation as necessary for salvation is to reject the very Word that saves.
Catholicism is a cosmological religion - that is, one that integrates all the phenomena of space and time into a sacred order in which divine and human existence are continuous. For the Catholic, therefore, religion is not private and autonomous but communitarian and cosmic. In a cosmological religion, the central act of worship embodies in symbols the community's understanding of the nature of God and of existence. Both the religious symbols of Catholicism and the social behaviour of Catholics are outward signs of inner beliefs, the high altar and the large family equally eloquent about one's world view. The cult informs the culture and is inseparable from it. The Catholic perception of the liturgy was summed up long ago in the Latin saying, Lex Orandi, lex credendi.
Posted by
Jonathan
Dawn to Decadence
"The inspired incantations of words can induce pleasure and avert grief; for the power of the incantations, uniting with the feeling in the soul, soothes and persuades and transports by means of its wizardry."
Gorgias
"But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle."
Evelyn Waugh
"The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a 'warm body' democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction....Once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader — the barbarians enter Rome."
Robert Heinlein
1. It is culture, not politics, which determines the success of a society. Politics can help to change a culture and save it from itself.
2. The state expands when the civil society contracts. When individuals stop acting responsibly, government feels the need to step in and pick up the slack. The greatest invitation to statism is a society that won't take care of itself.
3. The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds.
4. The behavior of an organization can best be predicted by assuming it to be controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
5. Everyone is a traditionalist in their area of expertise.
6. Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. It is important to develop alternatives to existing policies and to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.
7. Nothing is as important for freedom as recognizing in the law each individual’s natural right to property, and giving individuals a sense that they own something that they are responsible for.
8. It is not the personal that is political, but the political that is personal. People with unusually thin skins ascribe the small insults, humiliations, and setbacks consequent upon human existence to vast and malign political forces; and, projecting their own suffering onto the whole of mankind, conceive of schemes, usually involving violence, to remedy the situation that has so wounded them.
9. Finite, relative problems can be solved; infinite, absolute problems cannot be solved. In other words, human beings will never create a society which is free from contradictions.
10. Whatever a man prefers to God, that he makes a god to himself.
11. In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself.
12. Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
13. Some things are meant to be known, not understood.
14. One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.
15. Ideology, fear, envy, and utopianism are the causes of war.
16. The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.
17. Facts do not 'speak for themselves.' They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
18. The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.
19. In literature, importance is not important, only good writing is.
20. Most unhappily the world took a wrong turn in the road: the secularist Renaissance of the fifteenth century threw weak man on his own feeble resources; the Protestant revolt of the sixteenth, divided his soul; the Rationalism of the eighteenth, blinded it; the Liberalism and Naturalism of the nineteenth sold it to the sinister powers of matter, greedy commercialism, base pleasure, and passion, and now, by a historical consequence, we reap a harvest of dragons amid the nightmare of a barbarous and universal war.
21. There is no such thing as a lost cause because there is no such thing as a gained cause.
22. Patriotism is devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.
23. In multiracial societies, citizens do not vote in accordance with economic and social interests but in accordance with race and religion.
24. Man in this world cannot make his will his law without any regard to limits and the fixed nature of things.
25. There exists a transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society.
26. Human beings, or governments, are not black boxes engaged in a competition of interests. What matters most is the character of the individual, the character of the community and the character of government. When designing policies, it's most important to get them to complement, not undermine, people's permanent moral aspirations - the longing for freedom, faith and family happiness.
27. Existing communities have legitimate expectations which take precedence over the demands of strangers. There may be duties of charity toward strangers, but charity is a gift, and there is no right to receive it, still less to force it from those reluctant to give.
28. True neighborhood associations – like all voluntary and contractual associations – are built upon the very same institutional foundations as markets: private property and voluntary exchange protected by the rule of law. Where these institutions are protected, markets develop and rule economic affairs. At the same time, the existence of these institutions allows for individuals and families to band together in voluntary associations to provide for many of the goods that pure economic exchange does not. This sort of private ordering is the heart and soul of civil society. It cannot be duplicated by government.
29. Rhetoric is an ethical as well as an instrumental discipline. A debasement of language is also a debasement of reality. Some words are god terms which can validate almost anything. These words become unassailable, as do the causes attached to them.
30. Envy plus rhetoric equals “social justice.”
31. Knowledge and accomplishment are not democracies and society does need, and require, an aristocratic intellectual class, but one formed by the ancient classics.
32. Democracy, Immigration, Multiculturalism – pick any two.
33. Religion is a social and not merely an individual institution. In the formation of social institutions the past is our indispensable teacher. Tradition matters not merely because it is the beginning but because what past generations have discovered and passed to us is valuable. Religious institutions are central to culture’s traditions; they are inseparable from its political and social health.
34. The professoriate has been given the greatest luxury society can offer: studying beauty. All that they needed to do to justify that privilege was to help their students see why they should fall on bended knee before Plato, Dante, Di Vinci, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and so on, in thanks for lifting us out of our usual stupidity and dullness. Instead, they set themselves up as more important than the literature and art that it was their duty to curate and created a tangle of anti-humanistic nonsense that merely licensed students' ignorance.
35. An intellectual is someone who cares more about ideas than people. An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who only speaks out in others, and a successful academic may be able to use his success to reach the general public on matters about which he is an idiot. A public intellectual is either an expert working dutifully within the confines of his expertise or a fool at best and fraud at worst.
36. The skepticism of intellectuals means that they are wont to look suspiciously upon any idea that does not first flatter them into believing that they are central to its realization.
37. It should not pass our notice that almost all of our so-called iconoclasts are not so bold as to smash the idols of this age, in whose presence they are wont to grovel, but rather are only so bold as to make great play of pulverizing the already smashed idols of another.
38. Many of the faults and follies of the world have arisen and flourished because of the desperate attempt by fools to eschew what they believe fools believe.
39. The human psyche is fundamentally rational, but with zones of commitment fenced off from the ordinary rules of evidence and logic. These zones are chiefly race, religion, and innate genetic difference.
40. There is too little reading in the world and too much writing. People do not willingly read if they can have any thing else to amuse them. To write well, one must read good writing.
41. The corporeal is the mysticism of the materialist.
42. Voluntary community associations organically formed and grounded in the nuclear family are the best protections of individual liberty.
43. Most people are not rational. They are tribal.
44. Propaganda and morale are as important as military superiority.
45. Capitalism is a useful means of economic wealth creation but a poor means of healthy and lasting social organization.
46. Commoditification outside of created goods is dehumanizing. Individualism is a fetish devoid of the goodness humanity may access.
47. Tradition, custom, and social cohesion are necessary to convey norms and reign in the excesses of public markets.
48. The unitary state must never be trusted. Constitutions are useless without strong, local, voluntary institutions that exist outside the jurisdiction of politics.
50. We must bring to our private lives the love of human beings, which is inseparable from the belief that all human life is inherently valuable and was created in the image of divinity.
51. There is always present the cancer of human vice rooted in selfishness and the ultimately pointless search for status.
52. The human race is a tragic, comic mixture of decency and wickedness, whose inconsistencies make for literature and the possibility of redemption.
53. In the name of individualism, liberty, equality, the free market, science, and progress, modern society has undermined families, kinship groups, churches, and other regional associations to which humans should be loyal.
54. In the quest for personal liberty, humans appeal for deliverance to the nation-state, which alone has the power to challenge and suppress. In the exchange for deliverance, allegiance is transferred to the state. Ties are then severed to local institutions that provide meaning and purpose, moral guidelines and restraint. Stripped of these, the restoration of community is sought through mass politics. Community is then defined, perversely, as political power through collective association.
55. War is the primary means of expanding state power, which upends traditional loyalties and institutions. It lessens intervening authorities between the state and the citizen.
56. The irreducible unit of civil law is not the individual citizen. There are multiple social units, each with sovereignty within its sphere of legitimate authority. The common and final is the natural rights of men, represented by the family, upon which all others are based. Pluralistic authority within the nation-state must be lodged in institutions, not the individual or civil government. There is no final earthly authority.
57. A functional pluralism of covenant best maintains civil liberty. Intermediate institutions – church, voluntary associations, family, and kinship groups – keep the state from tyranny.
58. If divine temporal sovereignty is not represented, the possibility of unnecessary conflict is lessened. Final temporal sovereignty in a sanctions-bringing institution is always operational and scornful of vital intermediate institutions such as church and family.
59. Final sovereignty should rest not in the state but in the natural rights of citizens. The twin doctrine of the rights of individuals and the centralized state as the protector of individual rights is the road to terror. A final sovereignty that rests in the state or in the individual conscience marginalizes the institutions and customs necessary to maintain the freedom of conscience.
60. Covenant, not contract, is the best central political and legal organization of community. Covenant is permanently binding and immune from annulment or revision except by specific custom.
61. All things good are as difficult as they are rare.
62. Market utopianism, assertive lifestyle individualism, and celebration of consumerism will always be inadequate to address the innate desire for meaning, solidarity, and common purpose that modern commercial society must prepare for.
63. Societal central planning is irresponsible because humans are severely limited in knowledge. Our knowledge is bigoted, dispersed, and fragmented, wholly unavailable to society at large, governmental representatives, and would-be experts. Much of it, in fact, is embodied in habit and practice unfit to convey in explicit propositional form.
64. There must be consistent resistance to the pleasant illusion that social problems can be solved through education. The cause of most national social problems is too little marriage and too much illegitimacy.
65. The first and chief responsibility of the state is the physical protection of citizens. Citizenship must be earned by a subjection of personal preference to the healthy norms of community.
66. As individuals distance themselves from the positive, traditional norms – viewed as remnants of a discredited past – fanaticism, nihilism, and cultural pessimism fill the void. Social disruption is then a means to seize power and fortune as an apocalyptic mood and calls for purifying upheavals devolve into a new civic religion.
67. It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
68. Forbid less; demand more.
69. Civilization has been built on bloody conquest. It has also been built and maintained by willingness to both kill and sacrifice oneself to evade bloody conquest. This is part of our nature and part of what built the shining cities which dot our weary world.
70. The fetish of egalitarianism has initiated much harm. Two cherished ideals are contradictory: first that ability should be fully employed and fairly rewarded, and second that all are metaphysically equal in ability, with observed differences mere illusions and likely arising from some malign intent on the part of the observer.
71. Electoral democracy is problematic in a multicultural society, as there is strong temptation to vote for representatives of your own cultural group.
72. The notion that the human species can be improved in any large way, and that humans are capable of living in harmony, is a deeply dangerous idea.
73. Our lives do not belong to us. We are under the sway of Powers that transcend human reason.
74. If there are neither true nor false judgments, man is no longer held accountable. Without universal foundations, morality is impossible.
75. Ideology, not faith or national custom, destroys cooperative consensus. Ideology is the enemy of personal and political freedom, religion, patriotism, and tradition. Pluralism sourced in tradition is an essential means to pursue the truths that imperfect humans perceive through a glass darkly.
76. Repentance and self-limitation must be the foundation of human existence. Any means of personal definition must never be exalted above humility and self-sacrifice.
77. As society gradually solves problems of basic survival and reduces other miseries of the human condition, the fringe elements of that society feel an increasingly strong compulsion to become obsessively angry about ever more trivial causes to recapture the sense that life is a painful struggle.
78. Wise behavior and good conduct secure economic well-being. Disintegrating families invite the waste of public funds and policy gimmicks.
79. Those cultures with a history of liberty that are infected with the pandemic of self-aggrandizement and lust have forgotten that the family, not the individual, is the base unit of society.
80. We must be concerned with how to transmit values. There is a crude commercial culture that states there is little more to life than consumption. Yet there are deep ties and obligations across generations. These are much more satisfactory than the thin freedoms of mobility.
81. The flesh is the test of the spirit.
82. Total loyalty is possibly only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
83. The state which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing a suffering person needs: a loving, personal concern.
84. There is a bedrock materiality that underlies all humanity. It is not constructed performance but rather a groundwork of inherent values across cultures. All efforts to create human flourishing must coincide with this need to be loved, recognized, and a part of meaningful work.
85. The disappearance of nations would impoverish no less than if all humanity became alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind; they are its collective personalities. The very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a unique facet of divine intention.
86. Land has been the main source of wealth since pre-modern times, and it has always belonged to tribes, families, or individuals, unless monopolized by monarchs. To compel people to give up what they own and surrender their private interests to the state requires violence as a routine means of governance.
87. A transcendent moral order is aided by a natural organic state, not an artificial one based on planning. Society cannot be planned and precision engineered like a machine, which is rigid, repetitive, and tends to break down. Organic life is flexible, adaptable, self-perpetuating, and based on the realities of evolutionary nature. Artificial, highly-planned states and the multinational firms that advance their power treat humans as little more than components.
88. Strong government need not be intrusive or large. It is an error to make government both large and weak, which is ineffectual and unworthy of public respect. Large-scale governmental power must defend national interests and provide citizens with the services they demand in the most efficient manner possible – little else.
89. All societies are based on a particular view of human nature.
90. People are not equal, interchangeable units of production and consumption. Differences of race, nationality, culture, gender, and ability are not obstacles to social harmony that must be removed. Citizens must never feel compelled to conform to any model of an ideal society.
91. Public affections begin in families. Our distinctive identities require that humans rightly love their kin above all strangers. Charity arises from the home.
92. All societies are a contract between the living, the dead, and those yet born. Individuals are parts of a larger body which will continue after individual death.
93. The manners and morals of a nation, codified chiefly by its religious and political institutions and its social structure, are prescribed by its past.
94. There is moral equality of mankind that is to be found by virtue in all conditions. Yet any political program of egalitarianism is treacherous. First, it is unjust because such a program would rely upon compulsion and encourage envy. Second, it would move masses downward as upward mobility is impossible because of genetic inequality. Defying nature is unworkable.
95. Ambitious elites deploy the rallying cry of equality as a pretext to reallocate resources for themselves. Abstract principles, however appealing, cannot be applied directly to solve any real political problem.
96. Humans are tied to a family, a locality, and a nation. These societies are not mechanistic; they are organic because the present and future are inseparable.
97. Wisdom and prejudice are often synonyms. The origin of prejudice, its nature and function, are the collective experiences of the past which contain much wisdom. The longer they have lasted, the more they prevail and the more they must be cherished. When feelings contradict theories, the feelings are true and the theories are false.
98. Liberty is seldom derived from universal principles. It is the legacy of the hard-won battles of ancestors. Imposing liberty upon other lands is exceedingly difficult challenge made impossible by any uprising supported by the local populace. Such a fight would require a level of frightfulness that does not merit close inspection.
99. The ideal political party is one comprised of firm and determined patriots who manage the state based upon the morals of continuity.
100. Leisure and relaxation are desirable because those who always labor have no true judgment. It is necessary to survey completed work and to plan for the future by the past.
101. Human beings prefer to be misgoverned by people like themselves, rather than wisely, fairly, and honestly ruled by the Other or the Other’s stooges.
102. The energy that shapes world events springs from the innate emotions of tribal pride and religious belief. These must never be considered anachronisms.
103. Other peoples do not wish to be like ourselves. To base action on this assumption is to undergo a fit of absence of mind.
104. Do not mistake solemnity for significance.
105. We must avoid the use of the language of ethics as a tool for self-interest.
106. Liberty without virtue is greatest of all possibly evils. Virtue does not exist without the free choice of what is good. Although humans are not determined creates, we are conditioned ones. Human persons have not only a conditioned free will but a conditional one. We must avoid the extremes of determinism and fatalism and a radical, post-moral self-will.
107. A rejection of the idea that the self is internally structured by conscience is a rejection of truth on behalf of emotional egalitarianism.
108. Egalitarianism, democracy, and pantheism are lethal toxins without manners and mores.
109. When words become a test for virtue, they also serve as a mask for vice. This is why sanctimony and ruthless self-interest are such powerful allies.
110. It is uncomfortable to discuss the constraints of culture because of the fetish for multiculturalism and the stubborn insistence to see the world through the prism of class.
111. Much of modern life is wholly unnatural and therefore insufficient for the nourishment of the human soul.
112. The only part of any religion that is empirically verifiable is original sin.
113. An education that is only negative, that only questions assumptions and received wisdom, is destructive to the social fabric.
114. It is best to follow leaders who might show us better versions of ourselves. There are many false and angry gods who would distract us from cultural decay. The communion of minds and the collective memory of a society are kept alive and healthy by an understanding of and respect for enduring and profitable prejudices.
115. The best way to defeat status-seeking outrage among those seeking to achieve victim status is to demonstrate status high enough so that one’s position cannot be affected. Impotent outrage is the quickest to dissipate.
116. The issue is not the existence of planning, but whether it should be accomplished centrally or divided among many individuals.
117. The intellectual foundations of Western civilization are the Christian ethic, the scientific spirit, and the rule of law.
118. A market economy incorporates an unimaginably large number of personal decisions based on an even greater number of individual preferences, and does so with accuracy through the price mechanism. The system is often unfair but remains preferable to all alternatives.
119. A well ordered society exhibiting rational coordination among its members need not be a designed and commanded order.
120. Legitimate government actions are those that adhere to the principle of equality before the law. This takes root infrequently and must be carefully guarded.
121. Abstract rules of just conduct, which is the ideal, require agreement of and confidence in values.
122. The organic growth of socially beneficial customs and tradition is a rare and valuable thing. If they decay, there is no way that legislation can replace them. They arise spontaneously or not at all.
123. The bonds of history, territory, language, and allegiance hold a society together. Only when there is a sense of membership are people disposed to submit to a common rule of law and willing to place contractual obligations to strangers above family and tribe.
124. Excessive emphasis on the free and sovereign individual frays the necessary bonds of community and tradition. And the heavily interventionist state undermines these traditions further. This is why civilized order is a rare achievement in human history. The goal of any political leadership must be to give a coherent and humane account of the kind of pre-political membership that will sustain free institutions and a rule of law. This essential loyalty cannot be replaced without cost by relations of a purely contractual kind.
125. Modernism was a kind of architectural Protestantism that sought to “cleanse” its version of sacred space from the corruptions of Genius. Buildings were to be monuments to the genius of the modernism architect rather than to the glories of Greece, Rome, or God. This “rationalist” turn of mind does not uplift the soul. Modernism appeals to the forbidding chill and soulless slab of staid bureaucracies, not to a public sense of beauty.
126. A war of ideas is not an intellectual process; it is a political one often corrupted by the games demonstrating of moral superiority.
127. The self is diminished, not fulfilled, when intimacy is separated from love. To give our lives meaning, it is necessary to make commitments to each other. These define us. Mores and manners have everything to do with what distinguishes us as human. No amount of cultural programming can ever deny that we have higher desires than those of the body.
128. It is poverty to in the name of openness and personal expression cast aside the wisdom of convention as repressive and meaningless.
129. Seemingly new social models such as modernism or cultural revolution embrace egalitarianism and the fall of boundaries under the false pretense that we may bend reality and human nature according to our own desires. In the end there is the emotional emptiness of the noncommittal, the ever changing, and the isolated.
130. To be nonjudgmental is a poor virtue where there are limitless choices and the inability to weigh one against the other. The refined capacity for judgment is an attractive quality.
131. A world without consequences is a destructive lie. Freed from the restrictions of convention, we do not satisfy our every desire and increase the store of human happiness. The emotional, the moral, and the physical consequences make us yearn for the order and restraint of traditional social forms.
132. The common good is achieved first by the principle of association, which are the little platoons of families and neighborhoods.
133. Science beyond its appropriate bounds is the chief thread to allegiance of the principle of human equality. Science demonstrates that we are not equal in our natural capacities. Groups of humans scattered around the world are very different in capabilities, attitudes, and behaviors. Many of these differences are genetically mediated and cannot be altered by education. We are equal, however, in our standing as human beings in relation to something higher than ourselves.
134. People will not follow abstract theories. They will behave in ways that promoted the survival of generations of their ancestors.
135. Starting with limitless freedom ends with total despotism.
136. Transnational pathologies cannot seep across borders without a loss of confidence that there is something worth assimilating toward.
137. The significant task is not just to criticize power, but to exercise it well and with restraint. The integration of art and life is not a grubby compromise if the task is to bring art and knowledge into fruitful engagement with experience.
138. Those overwhelmed by hate cherish it as a badge of moral superiority.
139. In building grand projects for the purification of humanity, ordinary life and the ordinary people who live it all too often become dispensable.
140. There is a transcendent order that rules society and conscience.
141. Humans have attachment to the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence even as they stand against the leveling forces of modern society.
142. Civilized society requires orders and classes. A free and civilized society requires freedom and faith in custom and convention, a distrust of sophists, calculators, and economists who would reconstruct society upon abstract design. It requires a wariness of innovation and a recognition that prudent innovation is the means of social preservation.
143. The idea of natural right asserts knowledge and virtue as a sturdy foundation of a well-ordered society.
144. The more you socialize the costs of personal and family autonomy, the more license you give others to regulate it.
145. Ordeal comes before dominion.
146. Belonging comes before belief.
147. Race and gender have more to do with biology than with literature or theory.
148. Concerns of family, illegitimacy, divorce, and marriage are at the root of most poverty.
149. To have moral realism is to resist living a life of ideology, with its special form of unconsciousness and risk of becoming an agent to evil.
150. Not every good fight is a millennial fight, a twilight struggle.
151. For all the fealty to historical materialism, political movements rise to power not on the wings of theory but through the politics of irreducible choice.
152. You cannot have democratic accountability in anything bigger than a nation state.
153. Human nature has no history.
154. Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.
155. The religious impulse cannot be suppressed.
156. Most evil is banal and committed by ordinary people choosing their appetites and habits, not a splendid and Miltonic fall of a few grand and tragic choices. It consists of a steady stream of small-time compromises, petty sins, and small steps downward. Hell is repetition, where the same pattern of choices are reasserted and no sin is an island.
157. Reason does not lead to the dead end of atheism and rebellion against God; properly employed, it leads to a well-governed life where suffering and evil can be mitigated and confined to bearable proportions. Sensible policy, achieved on the basis of consent, is possible if the constitutional order is well designed, and if the people have sufficient virtue.
158. Every living creature must possess some spiritual dynamic, which provides the energy necessary for that sustained social effort which is civilization. Normally this dynamic is supplied by a religion, but in exceptional circumstances the religious impulse may disguise itself under philosophical or political forms.
159. The truth of the self-sufficient soul coexists with the truth of the vital importance of human connections.
160. Every man is a reactionary in the subject of his knowledge.
161. Great critics have no theory. Those who adopt a theory are imitating somebody else. All useful criticism is based upon experience of living. Just as wisdom is personal, there is no method except the self.
162. Because there are pockets of ambiguity does not mean there are not fields of clarity.
163. We must depend on education, tradition, belief, and prejudice, the products of culture which are inherited wisdoms and experiences, because our power of reason has limits.
164. The task of critical reason is to peer through the cultural web in which we are enmeshed so as to perceive clearly the reality that exists, including the man-made reality of the social order, whose terms give our lives meaning. Yet when questioning our culturally created assumptions to clear away attitudinizing or propaganda or superstitious prejudice, it must be recognized that human nature is not man-made and society cannot be molded at will.
165. We cannot live justly and happily unless we live under a power out of ourselves, a power above us, transcendent over our wills and our choices. Human government is not viable or sufficient without divine government above it in some unspecified relationship.
166. A non religious principle, replacing God, that is truly transcendent and not a tool of our passions does not exist. It is the power of the human desire for justice, so often partisan and perverted, that turns men into fanatics. The strength of religion is to recognize two apparently contrary forces in the human soul: the power of injustice and the power of our desire for justice. The stubborn existence of injustice reminds us that man is not God, while the demand for justice reminds us that we wish for the divine. Religion tries to join these two forces together.
167. Humans like to interact most with people like themselves, and they will develop institutions to allow them to do so.
168. Genetic differences between human groups, and in particular differences in average native intelligence, has been an important factor in human history.
169. Competitive moralism, of which we see too much, is driven by something amoral and animalistic: it is the age-old struggle for supremacy, the competition of rivals, placed in more respectable terms. The struggle becomes absurd — not in its underlying aims which are ever natural — but in the ever greater distance between high claims and base motives, wherewith the only point is in outdoing one’s rivals in “goodness” whilst not actually caring a damn whether anything good will come of it. Intellectual life — that supposedly higher sphere and haven from beastly struggle — becomes diseased with it, even such that, in terrible and political times, there is a delirium of the senses, and a dulling of the faculties, except for the primitive and still acute instincts for success.
170. Relativism is the compliment that desperation pays to failing ideas.
171. Tribal particularities are far more powerful than ideologiocal abstractions.
172. Discontent is the parent of all radicalism.
173. The natural family is the fundamental social unit, inscribed in human nature. It is centered around the voluntary union of a man and a woman in a lifelong covenant for the purpose of satisfying the longings of the human heart to give and receive love, welcoming and ensuring the full physical and emotional development of children.
174. Military strength is necessary to preserve peace, and the war-fighting potential of a democracy is at its greatest when war is most intense and at its weakest when war is most limited.
175. Strong nuclear families are the basis of any good society.
176. Law and order are the first duty of the state.
177. Every age has its compensations. Youth has innocence; adulthood has power; age has wisdom.
178. Access, proximity, and personality matter more in upward social mobility than what is known.
179. There are no inevitable courses of events powerless to human planning and reason. It is not right that what in history is known to us is called laws of inevitability, and what is unknown is called free will. Reason does not lead to the dead end of atheism and rebellion. Properly employed, it leads to a well-governed order, a well-tempered religion, and a well-governed life. Suffering may be mitigated and curbed, confined to bearable proportions.
180. Guidance by will and not by reason cannot lead to a more accurate understanding of human nature, a sound guide for human life and self-governance. Therefore an ideal system is private property rights and a prudent mixture of hereditary monarchy and representative government grounded in local communities. This will allow for a landed class of hard-working, independent-minded, and politically responsbile workers tied to the land who may become the foundation of society. They will have both the power and the interest to stop insane slides into the destructive fury of revolution.
181. A state is an organization with a comparative advantage in violence, extending over a geographic area whose boundaries are determined by its power to tax constituents.
182. It is unfortunate when movements advocating equality of opportunity turn into movements focused on enforcing results. Theory poorly explains differences in group outcomes: groups are not abstractions. They come with histories and cultures, neither of which are postmodern or arbitary but instead deep and long-lasting. And genes for mental traits are not distributed perfectly evenly among groups.
183. In an unequal society of human capital, the majority resents its diminished status. It harbors the expectation of employing elections to drastically overturn its condition. In turn, the minority fears the outcome that may follow from free elections and the assertion of majority rule. As a result, it resorts to authoritarian institutions to guarantee its social and economic advantage.
184. To speak of a moral culture is redundant. Culture is a received inheritance of moral precepts, reflected in the doings and not-doings of a social order. In an anti-culture, however, the doings are dominant, all the sources of restraint, especially shame and guilt, are cast aside as oppressions.
185. There is much to admire about those traditions of duty, plain speaking, courage, male companionship, reticence, decency, scorn for affectation and pretense, skepticism of government, dislike of intellectuals and religious enthusiasts, love of gossip, and dedication to tobacco and booze.
186. It is important to delight in the everyday life that has been granted us, and to have little patience with the psychological problems of free people, especially if they involve a 'search for identity' or some other form of self-seeking and self-involvement.
187. Stupidity and evil are the same if measured by the result.
188. While death destroys man, the thought of death saves him.
189. Mankind is inherently self-interested and not moldable into a form like the high-minded with their hands on levers of power. Mankind engages in a perpetual and restless desire for power and status. Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
190. A world of harmony and universal satisfaction are mirages. Tradeoffs between competing wants are inevitable.
191. Benefits from evolved societal rules cannot be articulated because they are developed through trial and error over centuries. Traditions provide wisdom without reflection.
192. The nation-state should be built as a political expression of a particular people. Map lines should follow organic human developments and histories such as ethnicity and religion as much as possible so as to minimize opportunities for conflict.
193. Humans are marked by more intractable separations than they would like to believe. Differences are not superficial and easy to combine. This tourist, superficial, overly aesthetic vision is carried by a passion for resemblance. Beyond recognizing and respecting the humanity of each person, there is pressure to see the other as the same as ourselves, and if we cannot stop ourselves from perceiving what is different, we reproach ourselves for doing so as if it were a sin.
194. The city-state and the nation-state are the only two political forms that have been capable of realizing the intimate union of civilization and liberty. The sovereign state and representative government are the two great artifices that have allowed for accommodation of huge masses of human beings within an order of civilization and liberty.
195. Defeating a guerrilla uprising broadly supported by the local populace requires a level of frightfulness that does not bear close inspection.
196. The state is a blunt instrument to modify social behavior and political climate.
197. The basis of society is not the individual, but the family and the neighborhood, because that is where citizenship is first and best learned.
198. The tendency of citizens to abandon the wider society and to define their lives in terms of material well-being and in relation to a small group of friends and family is most likely to occur in places of significant heterogeneity.
199. Without first principles, it is impossible to judge competing ideas without appeals to strength.
200. Virtue is not an exclusive commodity, and it should be defined outside of normal human experience. It is accessible but difficult. It signifies a habit attached to a faculty of the soul, disposing it to elicit with readiness acts conformable to our rational nature. Virtue is a good habit consonant with our nature.
201. Prejudices are visions about the way things are. They are divinations of the order of the whole of things, and hence the road to a knowledge of that whole. The mind that has no prejudices at the outset is empty.
202. Mostly-inbred human groups develop group characteristics — of behavior, and attitude, and socializability, as well as of mere appearance.
203. The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another less than they do in the most homogenous settings. Nearly all measures of civic health are lower.
204. The emotional and imaginative resources people invest in places are important components of individual and social self-identity and a source of loyalty and affection. These places are usually physical places.
205. The deformation of modern philosophy was caused by the rise of rationalism in extremis. Man is more than weights and measures; he is a creature rooted in Aristotelian common sense, who seeks the divine ground of being.
206. The rationalists destruction of the concept of the moral imagination resulted in man being disconnected from reason, order, peace, virtue, and fruitful penitence, and into the antagonist worlds of madness, discord, vice, confusion and unavailing sorrow.
207. The moral imagination triggers the act of pneumatic differentiation where man recognizes the distinction between the radically transcendent God and the created realm or world. It allows the growth and development of consciousness, initiates the theophanic event that enables man to enter the metaxy where he exists in his fullness in his questing for the nature of his existential being within the truth of reality. It is the key ingredient in man’s relentless search for truth, without which man may gain knowledge, but not wisdom, peace, or salvation.
208. There is the mystery of free will, of individual choice, of divine Providence, and of the creation and sustaining of tradition. These mysteries have been addressed throughout human history, not through science or discussion, but through myth and story.
209. When human relationships are debased and brutalized into an animal relationship for public spectacle, the entire culture is infected, debased, and brutalized.
210. The task of morality is to suppress selfishness. Loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity are moral concepts. The innate moral intuition are: preventing harm, reciprocity, loyalty to the in-group, respect for authority, and a sense of sanctity.
211. Moral cultures are cultivated based on the three binding foundations: ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity, as well as on the universally employed foundations of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity. The ideal is not a world of maximum freedom; it is a world of order and tradition in which people are united by a shared moral code that is effectively enforced, which enables people to trust each other to play their interdependent roles. It is a world of high social capital.
212. Small is the part of all the human heart endures can laws or kings cause or cure.
213. The good political order must be based upon human virtues. A de-emphasis of virtue is destructive to this. It believes that sufficient virtue are not attainable and therefore the good political order must be based on men as they are, that is upon their mediocrity and vices. This is not just realism or mere cynicism. It amounts to a deliberate choice as to how society should be organized, a decided de-emphasis on personal virtue. It leads to the new discipline of social science, which is concerned with coldly describing men as they actually are. But this is empty because only men with civic virtue will obey a constitution. This view leads naturally to value-free social science and social policies that seek to solve social problems through technocratic manipulation that refrain from "imposing value judgments" on the objects of its concern.
214. If man exists in opposition to nature, conquering it to serve his comfort, then nature does not define what is good for man. Man does. This view is the basis for the modern penchant to make freedom and comfort (that is, prosperity) the central concerns of political philosophy, whereas the ancients made virtue the center. Once man is outside nature, he has no natural teleology or purpose, and therefore no natural virtues. Since he has no natural purpose, anything that might give him one, like God, is suspect, and thus modernity tends towards atheism. Similarly, man’s duties, as opposed to his rights, drop away, as does his natural sociability. The philosophical price of freedom is purposelessness, which ultimately gives rise to the alienation, anomie, and nihilism of modern life.
215. Politics implies natural goods that are prior to human thinking about them. If man is political by nature, the goods of politics also exist by nature. The goods of politics are the ways man must behave to make political community work. If there are natural goods, there is a natural hierarchy of goods, and therefore a natural hierarchy of men, as different men pursue different goods. Civic equality may be salutary for the functioning of society, but men are not truly equal in value.
216. Reason and revelation cannot refute each other. Religion is the great necessity for ordinary men because it is in essence revealed law.
217. The instincts which give rise to the mysterious process of nature, by the dark and inscrutable ways in which we come into the world, are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform. Parents may not be consenting to their moral relation; but consenting or not, they are bound to a long train of burthensome duties towards those with whom they have never made a convention of any sort. Children are not consenting to their relation, but their relation, without their actual consent, binds them to its duties; or rather it implies their consent because the presumed consent of every rational creature is in unison with the predisposed order of things.
218. Intelligence - the different statistical profiles of different peoples on measures of cognitive function — is an important factor in history and the development of human groups. The workings of biology cannot suspended so as to maintain unpopular opinions that are indicators of low status in elite culture, and speculation based on sound science is descriptive and useful.
219. The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers.
220. Morality is not grounded in an ethic of wants and sentiment. It is grounded in reason, which is the arbitor of proper action. Humans are not always at liberty to pursue their wants, but they must always respect the dignity of the human person. There is a real self beyond the collections of perceptions and passions.
221. Most history is written by the dissenters.
222. The common good must begin with families, in neighborhoods and in communities. It begins with an organic cultural and religious transformation from the ground up.
223. One of the asymmetries of history is the lack of correspondence between the abilities of some leaders and the power of their countries.
224. Place no faith in time.
225. The proper development of order, convention, religion, respectability, and solidity begins with family life, as the illusion that we are entirely self-sufficient creatures whose destiny is in our hands shatters.
226. A society must progress by building on what has successfully provided it with peace, virtue, and freedom in the past, and so by building on the best fruits of its own traditions; to do this a society needs to preserve and sustain the sources of its strength. It is necessary to defend and uphold a society’s particular explicit and implicit creeds - prejudices - a word robbed of its full and complex meaning. These deeply held and widely shared premises are what holds a society together and what sustains unity, peace, and sensible reform in the otherwise raucous atmosphere of an increasingly democratic politics.
227. People mostly care about themselves. People are motivated by selfish altruism. People don't think much. Conformity is the norm. People are insecure, and worry that others will discover and reveal their flaws. People are pretty much only focused on themselves, so while Person A is worried that Person B will discover and reveal his flaws, Person B is worrying the same thing about Person A. In the end, people see in the world what they expect to see in it.
228. There are four braided but distinct strands of modern American conservatism. Traditionalists value continuity, order and hierarchy; libertarians prize personal freedom and social spontaneity; neoconservatives blend the New Deal’s idealistic spirit with conservatism’s muscular nationalism; and religious conservatives fight relativism, secularism and immorality.
229. Education is that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.
230. Defense of the realm, a stable moral order, and unintrusive government should be the highest aims of a nation-state.
231. Humility, Kindness, Forgiveness, Diligence, Charity, Temperance, and Chastity should be the highest aims of a person.
232. Human nature tends toward sin and we should adopt customs that steer us away from those tendencies.
233. Since the invention of photography, all art has been more or less consciously fraudulent.
234. Morality arises from sympathy among like-minded persons: first the family, then friends and colleagues. Rights grow from convictions about how we ought to manage relations with people not like us, convictions that are nourished by education, religion, and experience.
235. There's a limit to what you can say in a multicultural society, especially with regard to inherited difference in intelligence, as measured by abstract reasoning ability, among groups.
236. There are many nation-states impervious to the logic of reason but highly sensitive to the logic of force.
237. The law of unintended consequences is a harsh mistress.
238. Local devotions are likely to be overcome by the power of unleashed human ambition.
239. Multiculturalism has led not to integration but to segregation, endangering liberal democracy which is poisoned by the rise of identity politics as aggrieved groups jockey for special treatment. The effect is inexorably divisive, a culture of victimhood that sets group against group, each claiming that its pain, injury, oppression, humiliation is greater than that of others.
240. Clichés are annoying for the tediousness of their truth, not their untruth.
241. We may not be interested in the reality of human nature, but it is interested in us.
242. The truth is great and shall prevail when none cares whether it prevail or not.
243. A community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.
244. Always lurking are cults of murderous violence that exalt death and destruction and despise the life of the mind.
245. Civilized decline can be so charming one does not notice it is about to accelerate into uncivilized decline.
246. No well-adjusted person should be, or should be required to be, interested in politics very much.
247. It is almost always relevant to ask the classical question, who stands to gain?
248. It is a moralistic fallacy to think that phenomena that ought not exist should therefore be spoken and written about as if they do not exist.
249. Politicians look to the next election; statesmen may look to the next generation; but monarchs must look to the next generation. There is significant reassurance and security of a certain amount of continuity at the top in a highly mobile and volatile society. People are comforted by a familiar name and face.
250. There is a deep emotional satisfaction in the pride of a father whose child wants to emulate him.
251. When the exceptions become the rule, it is possible to indignantly dismiss biological conjectures so as to deny that there is a basic human nature. This facilitates intellectuals being funded so as to carry out improbable social engineering projects.
252. Citizens lose trust in political leaders not because they are imperfect but because they are not honest.
253. When confronted with uncomfortable truths, most people will resort to the “cultural conditioning” argument. Fear of the unchangeable is common.
254. Much of life is best understood through the prism of status wars.
255. Success comes to those whose desire is stronger than their fear.
256. Proximity and diversity is a dangerous combination.
257. Politics and history are a moral contest between good and evil, not of individuals who are products of historical forces greater than themselves.
258. Liberty should not be an end in itself; it is instead a means, a natural endowment, by which to achieve the common good. Individuals must use their liberty well. Authority, by creating a just order, encourages liberty over license.
259. A person will flourish by concentrating on the aspects of life that can be controlled rather than by reacting to external forces.
260. Every society and civilization is an attempt to create order, an orientation of men's lives toward nature, society, and the divine.
261. The most subtle test of character is set in the absence of adversity.
262. There is far too much corruption, racketeering, and nepotism among humans to have faith in placing large amounts of money and property in the hands of "the people."
263. Life is short, and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.
264. Pluralism, sound culture, and freedom define the true meaning of the word liberal.
265. If one has the intelligence to see which rules are real and which are fake, the respectfulness to follow the real rules, and the courage to break the fake rules, one can get ahead in this world. In fact, people will love the breaking of the fake rules.
266. Outsider powers can play an important facilitating role bringing together partners, but only if they have independently determined that they prefer peace to a continuation of war.
267. Diversity and freedom of speech are always in tension; as diversity grows, so, inevitably, will the demand for censorship.
268. An individual will make worse decisions in individual cases on average if excluded from consideration is prior learning about the general category.
269. Plato's disease is the assumption that reality fundamentally consists of abstract essences best described by words or geometry. In truth, reality is largely a probabilistic affair best described by statistics.
270. Ambition can create a little madness.
271. Culture must be at ease with the inheritance of the past. It must be able to refer to things beyond itself.
272. To view all forms of violence as equally evil is to think that as long as one persists the others may still be undertaken.
273. The question of if genetic differences exist and why falls into the domain of science - of genetics, psychometrics, and anthropology. A priori, there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.
274. Instead of scooping for symbols, seeking poetry, and being at least receptive to majestic truths, many prefer to rewind their petty postmodern formula for one more deconstruction. And if hegemony and racism and social constructs are what is sought, that all belief in the power of art has been destroyed.
275. There should be little patience with "ologies" and "isms" that claim life can be reduced to a single guiding force or principle - economics, race, the mind, brute force, sexuality, material chance.
276. Reality consists of two distinct, absolute, and all-inclusive elements, something like matter and mind or nature and spirit, which exists together in a complex perpetual relationship in the universe and the existential world of mankind.
277. To be born into a minority is, in part, to be born into a collective experience of insecurity. Group identity can be the enemy of individuality; the group is naturally threatened by the impulses in some of its members to step outside of the collective experience, as an indulgence in individuality can be seen as a collaboration.
278. Any chain of cause and effect must ultimately begin with an uncaused cause. No matter how far science advances, an explanation of ultimate origins must always, by the very definition of the scientific method, remain a non-scientific question. It is possible to defer to scientific explanations for physical processes while still remaining within the central Judeo-Christian tradition: God provides answers for ultimate cause and purpose.
279. There are advantages to small community: in the small state, the city, or the village, the man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is that in a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us.
280. The American founding documents intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
281. In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.
282. Liberty, freedom, and virtue should never be an ideology.
283. Something is not wrong because it is illegal; it is illegal because it is wrong. Once this distinction is lost, civil society becomes all but impossible because a broadly agreed morality is a basis of social cohesion.
284. When there’s no longer a sufficiently strong moral consensus and when the state actively disapproves of a self-reliant citizenry, what remains is the law. And law detached from any other social pillars is not enough to sustain a civil society.
285. Models and thought experiments are designed to illumiate principles. Simplification is necessary to see the world more clearly.
286. Perfectly in accord with settled principles of biology and genetics are the following: there are group-statistical differences between races and genders, these differences have developed via the pressures of natural selection working on the peculiarities of small founder populations, and they likely include group-statistical differences in personality, cognitive function, and behavior.
287. History cannot be a science; it is the very opposite, in that its interest resides in the particulars.
288. An age (a shorter span within an era) is unified by one or to pressing needs, not by the proposed remedies, which are many and thus divide.
289. A movement in thought or art produces its best work during the uphill fight to oust the enemy, the previous thought or art. Victory brings on imitation and ultimately boredom.
290. The historian does not isolate causes, which defy sorting out even in the natural world; he describes conditions that he judges relevant, adding occasionally an estimate of their relevant strength.
291. The potent writings that helped to reshape minds and institutions in the West have done so through a formula or two, not always consistent with the text. Partisans and scholars start to read the book with care after it has done its work.
292. History, fundamentally, is made by individuals. All forms of determinism are grievously mistaken and destructive.
293. Human liberty is an absolute datum of consciousness and reality. The supreme pleasure and prerogative of the human person is to feel at once a moral being and a natural philosopher.
294. There are two dominant modern intellectual extremes and errors: scientific reductionism and histrionic subjectivism. Both are a state of childishness, where humans are permissive not from a love of liberty but because of a lack of self-control and fear of restraint. Innocence is praised because of the want for a license to behave like an infant. These extremes congeal into intellectual attitudes and institutional forms in the culture: the scientistic worship of material procedures and objects, and the anarchic exaltation of aesthetic eccentricity and self-expression, a world of incessant autobiography.
295. Any work of the philosophy of history that denies human agency and novelty does not understand that history is the graveyard of trends and the birthplace of counter-trends. There is no monocausality and no determinism in history.
296. Life which spurs desire and fills the mind is wider than science or art or philosophy or all together.
297. Responsibility, the foundation of the penal code, eludes scientific analysis. Learned foolishness is a dangerous folly, especially when clothed with the notion that purpose is an illusion.
298. Humans must respect themselves; morality and the civic social life are impossible without it. Yet self-respect must not engender vanity and self-righteousness.
299. Hope is itself a species of happiness, the chief happiness which this world affords. It is necessary in every condition.
300. In order to be taught to speak and seek truth, it is necessary to learn to hear it.
301. Tolerance, generosity, and reasoned skepticism are hallmarks of the truly liberal spirit.
302. Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.
303. The left believes in evolution but not biology; the right believes in biology but not evolution.
304. History does not consist of the struggle to determine the proper ideology. It is never "finished" after the end of all plausible alternatives. History is not about ideology, but "Who? Whom?" It continues because the struggle to determine who will be the who rather than the whom will never end.
305. A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. The art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. And government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
306. Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
307. The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
308. Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.
309. Flaws in character produce flaws in behavior that must be accounted for.
310. Humans judge others by their actions and themselves by intentions.
311. Liberty contains the seeds of its own destruction. Liberty inevitably gives way to license, yet time after time, liberty, while not without its drawbacks, is the most reliable path to human excellence, prosperity, and progress. It is the natural condition in which human beings flourish.
312. It is in the nature of civilization that it must be in constant conflict with barbarism.
313. Surprise is a powerful antidote to cynicism.
314. All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
315. To go through life is not to walk across a field.
316. Often, change is made to create the illusion of progress.
317. Fear cuts deeper than swords, but inspiration cuts deeper still.
318. Human equality is a contingent fact of history. Equality is not given a priori; it is neither an ethical principle (though equal treatment may be) nor a statement about norms of social action.
319. The word 'social' in a sentence negates the meaning of the word following it.
320. Humans are creatures with souls and are not reducible to either bodies or minds. The tendency to identify primarily with bodies leads to an increasingly paranoid, puritanical, and prohibitionist attitude toward health and safety, while the tendency to understand as minds apart from bodies allows humans to treat bodies, and even moods, as property to be sold and manipulated technologically.
321. Architecture is perennially important because, unlike poems and songs, most acts of architecture are substantial public acts. What damage is done if a poet writes yet another bad modernist poem? Yet bad buildings and developments do not just come and go. They can degrade shared environments and damage the lives of thousands of people in practical and immediate ways. They will also be around for long periods of time. It is style and not sincerity that counts. Those who must use the building know the impact of the facade. There is a large difference between a sheet of glass and an arch that guides. One welcomes and one creates anxiety. The modernist is a repellant, rationalist, and Kafka-esque hell, populated by anxious people whose minds are elsewhere and who'd rather be anyplace else. It has all the personality and lovableness of a bureaucracy. The opposite orient themselves by reference to cultural history and norms and to basic human scale. Yet the details, textures, and motifs vary wildly. The structures relate to human scale as a physical being, and coexist easily with nature. It is better to produce structure that's devoted to beauty, class, and pleasure. There's subtlety, texture, depth.
322. Large social phenomena have an urban manifestation - subtle, cerebral, intellectual, tending towards decadence - and a rustic one - plain, active, instinctual, tending towards fanaticism. The two factions ought to strive to get along in pursuit of their common goal and hope that their negative tendencies will cancel each other out.
323. The despair of intellectuals is the hope of the nation.
324. Defending the virtue of traditional cultures should never give rise to a high-minded rationalization for a persisting status quo of medievalism and intellectual poverty.
325. Words and sounds - the rhythmic patterns in which they are bound together in music and poetry - have a unique power to awaken the mind. Rhythm has the power to prepare the soul to receive truths that would otherwise remain unintelligible.
326. Politics does not help to find meaning; it is not primarily about catering to one’s feelings and passions. It is the deployment of self-interest in the public arena.
327. As sympathies vary from person to person, some may respond more or less to these feelings, but the use of craftsmanship does not vary. It enables, but is not an end in itself. Art, at its best, give form to feeling, but it does not exist independently of it.
328. Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence.
329. Fascism is the cult of state organized unity, and it was a movement of centralized planning, group identification, and willing obedience to a charismatic leader. This movement is collectivist and authoritarian - large, intrusive, and modernist, a rallying point to or a substitute for commonality, an organism that should nearly always respond when people “hurt.” Fascism should be understood as a supercharged nationalistic statism, finding its theoretical wellsprings in Hegelian historicism, Rousseau's protean "general will," Nietzschean will-to-power, Darwinian evolution, and a smattering of the Social Gospel thrown in for good measure—all of which overturned the older liberalism of Locke, the Enlightenment, and the American Founders. It is committed to an ever-expanding state, without any limits in principle. Fascism is a collectivist doctrine, worshipful towards the centralized state, socialist in economics, hostile to both tradition and capitalism — in short, a left-wing ideology opposed in almost every respect to classical liberal conservative individualism. Fascism was a religion, and the animating dogma of the faith was that all citizens must be together. It is belief in the primacy of the state as a historical actor: everything in the state, nothing outside the state. All the statist and collectivism -isms were reactionary in that they sought to repackage tribal values under the guise of modern concepts. Hitlerism was socialism for one race. Bolshevism was socialism for one class. Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the ‘problem’ and therefore defined as the enemy. Fascism has a grave moral defect: it fails to recognize the individual as the key social unit. Right economic reasoning begins not with the nation but with human action, and right social policy begins with the recognition that society is made up of individuals with souls. Fascism, on the other hand, by ignoring the individual soul, is socialism's close cousin because it exults in the idolatry of the state. Contemporary progressivism is a political religion with its roots in German state theory, sharing a close family resemblance to fascism. Among the anatomical and genetic similarities: cult of unity, sacralization of politics, philosophical pragmatism, corporatism, relativism, Romanticism, hero-worship, collectivism. Here, corporations are a "partner" with governments, NGOs, the U.N., and other massive multinationals. The profit motive is "good" for efficiency and rewarding talent, but beyond that, there is a desire for order and predictability and planning. This mindset informs the entire class of transnational progressives, the shock troops of what H. G. Wells hoped would lead to his liberal-fascist "world brain." They want big corporations and big government working in tandem with labor, universities, and progressive organizations to come up with "inclusive" policies set at the national or international level. That’s not necessarily socialism — it’s corporatism. This is the economic philosophy of fascism. Government is the senior partner, but all of the other institutions are on board, so long as they agree with the government’s agenda. The people left out of this coordinated effort — the Nazis called it the Gleichschaltung — are the small businessmen, the entrepreneurs, the ideological, social, or economic mavericks who don’t want to play along.
330. Strong families and common, shared, confident culture is the backbone of strong community. Government should perform its limited and necessary duties well, as an instrument to support families and the organic development of communities.
331. Morality, not attempts to “change a system,” should be at the foundation of what must change in a time of public sickness.
332. Government can never be transformational; it can never love you; it can never serve as a substitute for parenthood; it is not a living organism. It is a blunt instrument that might or might not have a degree of competence.
333. Underneath the veneer of civilized discourse humans act in ways that are brazenly self-interested in the short term. Seeking short term status is a matter of self-interest.
334. The physical body is not irrelevant to a human community. The emotional subtext of human communication is crucial to human thought. It isn't a footnote. There is no thought without emotion, and there is no real communication without emotion‹subtle emotions that allow humans to recognize another human being and understand the nuances of what is being communicated.
335. Minority-rights doctrine has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a 'victim' group, while those at the receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the 'oppressive' majority.
336. Multiculturalism often means a society in which, in the interests of protecting the "collective rights" of various identity groups, individual rights are circumscribed and public discourse is ever more regulated by the state.
337. In a non-homogeneous nation-state, free markets and democracy will bring ethnic conflict.
338. No one is immune to the appeal of identity politics.
339. Community does not simply denote an aggregate of individuals, but a unity of persons in a common culture.
340. Members of a common society hold some moral obligations in common.
341. Liberal democracy is a radical imposition on the natural human desire to live clannishly.
342. The debasement of language goes hand in hand with the debasement of thought.
343. There is a large set of traditional values that have proven worth maintaining and over which we are perpetually obliged to deliberate in order to make the tough and sometimes tragic decisions about how to maximize the fulfillment of as many of them as possible; the state should be very small, so that the determinations of this deliberation – and not a general will or utopian disdain for the perpetual task of deliberation over the set values - can hold sway.
344. One should not accept a firm distinction between national interests and universal ideals.
345. One’s ethnicity should not replaces one’s humanity or individual character as the primary quality in virtue of which one deserves respect.
346. Humans would rather remember than think.
347. Statism and the politicization of life are common temptations that should be resisted regardless of environment. A lost faith in limited government, free market ideas, political democracy, diverse and competing social and cultural institutions, and the messiness of a free society is to gain faith in utopian scheming. Soon there will be a semi-religious awe for the centralized state as the expression of united national community.
348. There exists within statism a fear of free will which in the end results in disallowing chance for virtue.
349. The more closely related the alleged conspirators are, the more likely that there is an actual conspiracy.
350. Anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him.
351. The very foundation of humanity is freedom, not a mere absence of external restraint or a resolve to act “authentically,” but the capacity to choose between good and evil.
352. Genuine art serves freedom, not by instructing humans how to act but by helping to resist the forces that threaten to strip humans of moral agency altogether.
353. Nothing can cast aside blood and kin and faith.
354. Conservatism is opposition to all forms of political religion. It is a rejection of the idea that politics can be redemptive. It is the conviction that a properly ordered republic has a government of limited ambition. Liberal institutions in Europe are largely conservative ones in America: private property, free markets, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, and the rights of communities to determine for themselves how they will live within these guidelines. Progress comes from working out inconsistencies within this tradition, not by throwing it away. Conservatism has to do with social order; it recognizes that the sufferings of the underdog are not caused by the fact that some have managed to rescue themselves from their predicament. It is anti-utopian and against the view that what is human should be measured in terms of wealth or power. Conservatism originates in an attitude to civil society, and it is from a conception of civil society that its political doctrine is derived.
355. Enlightenment theorists promised liberation from various types of external authority: familial, religious, and political. But an unintended consequence of the implementation of Enlightenment theories is the elimination of freedom.
356. Civilization, at any given moment, can be boiled down to what its living members know and believe. This makes civilization fragile and it makes parents the primary guardians of its posterity.
357. Virtue, freely chosen, must be the aim of humanity.
358. When private charity is cast aside for instututionalized compassion, there emerges a source of enormous corruption.
359. Good intentions imposed in their normal belligerent and self-righteous way are deeply offensive.
360. The mere fact that someone desires something is not enough to grant a right to pursue it provided there is no interference with the rights of others. Human desires are fundamentally in need of emendation.
361. Intimacy as an affair of organs, discussed in measurable terms and in terms of sensation, is unjustly emancipated from the great project of human love. This is a form of liberation, but to liberate people from love is undesirable. It is a liberation into emptiness. It degrades not only the person but also child-rearing and responsibility and all of the difficult sacrifices which are necessary if one generation is to inherit the social capital of the previous one. Likewise homosexuality: to know inwardly a gender is to recognize the intimations and desires; there is no venture outwards into the unknown. It becomes in the end a matter of dehumanizing contractual negotiations.
362. Self-expression is proper if there is something interesting to express. And what makes a self interesting is a rigorous process of discipline and order and self-understanding.
363. Radicalism is a matter of temperament. Radicals are those who are arrested in the state of adolescent rebellion. They have grown away from experience and social capital. The temperament is an attempt to repudiate this so as to shape identity. Yet true maturity consists of the process of coming home again and seeing those things grown away from as true. Radical temperament is arrestment in the middle stage. The exploitation of the adolescent, where it looks not only normal but sacrosanct, is tragic.
364. Lustful fantasy depersonalizes the human being and improvishes the ability to confront human beings as they are. It is a flight from reality where one "controls." This is different from imagination, an imaginative re-creation which enables one to confront real people.
365. Every possible form of restraint and parental control should be encouraged, as there is much that threatens the ability of society to reproduce itself in an ordinary way.
366. Crowds are terrifying because they have a will of their own and act independently of rationality.
367. At the root of social order should be loyalty, allegiance, community, and tradition. Such a vision of society is one in which autonomous institutions and private initiatives predominate, and in which the law protects the shared values that bind the community together. Such a vision is only tenuously related to the market economy, to monetarism, to free enterprise, or to capitalism. It involves neither hostility toward the state, nor the desire to limit the state's obligation to the citizen. Its conceptions of society, law, and citizenship regard the individual not as the premise but as the conclusion of politics. Such a vision is opposed to the ethic of social justice, to equality of station, opportunity, income, and achievement, and to the attempt to bring major institutions of society under government control.
368. Hope can be a terrible liar.
369. There are two fundamental biological drives: the drive for self-preservation and the drive to spread genes through reproduction.
370. Self-deception keeps humans sane. Even when they do have enough clarity to realize the truth about themselves, if put on the spot, especially in front of strangers who will be judging them, they will still probably lie to save face. Judge people by the results of their actions and maneuvers, not their words. People will say almost anything to justify their actions, to give them a moral or sanctimonious veneer. The only thing that is clear, the only way to judge effectively, is by looking at actions and the results of actions. That is the effective truth.
371. A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.
372. Rationalism, with its universalistic “rights of man,” has an enthusiasm of its own that springs from an abstracting lack of concern for the densely complicated facts of any existing political landscape. And so the rationalists unleash unintended consequences that in turn unleash murderous passions and despotism.
373. The most dangerous human folly springs from convenient reason combined with an exaggerated love of justice.
374. There is a cultural metabolism that underlies the dialectic of modernism and its aftermath: much — if not quite everything — that we continue to esteem in the creative achievements of the last two centuries owes its existence to a curious compact between the bourgeoisie and its licensed opposition. But the dynamism of the avant-garde, with its unremitting appetite for innovation and its steady erosion of established values — including the values established by its own efforts — came in time to exert a powerful control over the very culture it still ostensibly “opposed.” So completely did the bourgeois society cede its cultural initiatives to this licensed opposition that the terms of their compact came to be fatefully altered. It was now the avant-garde that dominated cultural life — thus, in effect, ceasing to function as an authentic avant-garde — and the surviving remnants of bourgeois “reaction” that went through the motions of a principled resistance.
375. Romantic excess comes to a dead end with complete self-indulgence and the therapeutic effacement of the ideas of sin and redemption.
376. Those who get something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over.
377. Any calling which claims to be a whole philosophy of life is not one at all. It is a religion, and a false one.
378. Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.
379. There are no sweeping state solutions to a permanent problem of the human condition. There is no first step to such a solution.
380. Beneficial reform can only be gradual, and even when beneficial it must come with trade-offs. There is no cure for the ailments of the human condition. Human knowledge is gradual, cumulative and, perhaps most of all, fragile. The sophisters and calculators who seek to erase tradition in a riot of will and rationalism invite nothing but thunder and doom.
381. Every person has meaning apart from the society in which individuality has been formed.
382. A preoccupation with the future not only prevents from seeing the present as it is but often prompts rearrangement of the past.
383. Ignorance of human society runs deep. The experimentation of an open society is needed not only because different people often want different things, but even more importantly because humans are rarely sure of what works.
384. The most intelligent and most well-intentioned collective action eventually fails because of human weakness and selfishness.
385. Life happens at the level of events, not of words.
386. Moral failures become institutional and societal failures.
387. The more the state gets out of the business of policing the sin, the more the rest of the society needs to get into the business of condemning it.
388. The past shows unvaryingly that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favors, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all.
389. No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.
390. No one is immune to vice or a vessel for virtue — all are at risk of doing things that violate principles.
391. Patriotism is a species of unity that has some redeeming moral and philosophical substance. Patriotism — as opposed to nationalism — is a love for a creed, a dedication to what is best. Nationalism, a romantic sensibility, says, “My country is always right.” Patriots hope that their nation will make the right choice.
392. People at the top need a relaxed perspective, which gives judgment and balance. Workaholism is an introspection-killing disease, the anxious disability of tunnel-vision middle managers.
393. The more variety, the more power needed to smooth differences in variety out. This is against particularity, against the local, and that necessarily will work against freedom.
394. He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one.
395. All of the totalitarian "isms" are reactionary in the sense they are attempting to restore the ancient and instinctive yearning to live in a sacralized tribe. Socialism arises out of the burning issue of "the social question." The social question was aimed at how all of society was to be properly organized so as to give the deracinated urban masses a sense of belonging and meaning. The Fascists wanted socialism in one state. The Nazis wanted socialism for one race (an obvious form of tribalism). And the Communists desired socialism for one class. All of these ideologies sought a "new" politics of meaning, but what their adherents really desired was to restore what they thought they'd lost.
396. Individualism in the extreme leads to totalitarianism. Absent a cultural, religious or moral reason for action, it falls to the state to take the place of inherited tradition in the hyper-individualistic state.
397. What distinguishes civilized man from a barbarian must be acquired by every individual anew.
398. With power comes money, and money corrupts. States are giant extraction devices. They enable one to consume the products of human effort without producing anything oneself, and without winning the voluntary consent of the producers. State power is one of the most highly addictive substances known.
399. Tradition has a purpose. It's not just myth and habit. Tradition is the collective experience of humans.
400. Justice and liberty must stand or fall together. Liberty, a definite liberty, exists under law, the limits of which are determined by prescription. These liberties are not innovations, discovered in an Age of Reason, but ancient prerogatives guaranteed by immemorial usage.
401. In the revolutions of secular political religions there is a radical repudiation of all existing institutions and arrangements, absolute confidence in competence to build a new and far better society, willingness to kill contemporaries in great numbers, for the supposed benefit of posterity, contemptuous hostility to all religion, and a program for its enforced elimination from the world.
402. A statesman’s chief virtue is prudence.
403. The central revelation of Western experience is that man cannot ineradicably stain himself, for the wells of regeneration are infinitely deep. Even out of the depths of despair, humans take heart in the knowledge that it cannot matter how deep they fall, for there is always hope.
404. The intellectual probity of a person is measured not merely by what comes out of him, but by what he puts up with in others.
405. The spirit knows that its growth is the real aim of existence.
406. It is both man’s tragedy and his glory that some of his questions are unanswerable.
407. Conservatism at its highest is for the regeneration of spirit and character - with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded.
408. The scientific and other forces that have compelled society to think constantly in terms of the mass cause humans to accept the idea of ever more complete planning. But planning tends only too easily to totalitarianism; and the reason is that the secular state always concerns itself with riches or power - which are means, and not with the destiny of the soul, which is the end. The forces that appear to make human civilization so irresistible - wealth, organization, military power - are essentially hollow, and crumble to dust as soon as the human purpose that animates them loses its strength.
409. All culture arises from cult, from the religious belief systems adopted by communities in specific times and locales. All history is not simply a series of accounts of human conflict as told by winners, but is instead the working out of mysterious design on earth only fitfully discerned as such. The divine madness, a mind beside itself, allows one to order the soul properly. Imagination enables humans to begin to enter into the mind and experiences of others, upon which the Golden Rule - Do unto others as you would have them do unto you - is predicated. The effect of imagination is to deepen understanding of the larger world.
410. Since all things are the same, except for the differences, and different except for the similarities, it is always possible to make things look similar verbally, however different they are in the real world.
411. The world is not awash in a field of love consciousness. It is instead awash in fear, hatred, anger, jealousy, duplicity, lust, ego...and occasionally love. There is a reason so many people yearn for its life-giving power of requited love - because it is so rare.
412. It is not true that man cannot organize the world without God. But without God, he can only organize it against man.
413. The natural moral law — the moral truths we can know by reason — is a kind of global grammar by which the world can rationally discuss its future.
414. A nation is an enthocultural entity many years in the making. It is not an ideological proposition. It is not infinitely plastic. Change cannot be introduced without consequences.
415. Humans desperately want to recreate the feeling of the of spiritually resonant tribe. There is an inborn quest for community. This desire can be productive and vital if acted upon in a healthy manner. But it can also be twisted, distorted and corrupted when left unconstrained by law, philosophy and dogma. Tribalism is too central to the human condition to be transcended.
416. The more that social order is threatened by the unwillingness of indviduals to comply with its instructions, the more coercive it will become.
417. All is not philanthropic that speaks of utopia.
418. The most dangerous constants of our human condition – selfishness, status-seeking, the thoughtless imposition of will – have no solution. The state does not give meaning or dignity; every person possesses these inherently wholly apart from that place where individuality and family identity are formed. Unity organized by the state is false in any moment when concepts of “justice,” “rationalism,” and “rights” are taken to the uniformity of existence. There should be an order of voluntary associations serving as a barrier between the state and the individual, family, and community. The state is the arbiter and never a servant to a particular class or metaphysical interest. Our spiritual unity should always be grounded in the shared humanity cleansed by our creator and redeemer. The society possessing spiritual-like goals to be overseen by the state is the society that takes idealism into the realm of prohibitive and unforeseen danger.
419. Beauty is the index to civilization.
420. In organization, resist ideology, reflexive partisanship, wishful thinking, and emotion.
421. One cannot begin to philosophize without knowing why certain self-evident truths are the basis of justice and of sanity. There is no ground for human rights in positive law unless there is a prior ground in natural law recognizing that human beings are neither beasts nor God.
422. The human brain is wired to prefer tribal organization. All of the big "isms" of the 20th century – communism, fascism, socialism, environmentalism, and progressivism – are predicated on a truly reactionary vision that tries to recreate tribal living on "modern" lines. Communism is a tribalism of class, fascism is tribalism of nation, Nazism is tribalism of race, Jihadism is a tribalism of religion. Egalitarianism itself is a form of tribalism. It comes from the instinctive jealousy which says "no one should have more than his share." There has been only one truly revolutionary political idea: liberalism of the classical variety. It sought to break the logic of tribalism. Freedom is what we have in a state of nature. This naturally terrifies us and is why we prefer to live in the tribal arrangements we evolved in. Yet liberty is a human invention requiring civic education and commitment to certain enduring principles. It takes work precisely because it does not come naturally.
423. There are those Muslims who want the power that free inquiry confers, without either the free inquiry or the philosophy and institutions that guarantee that free inquiry. They are faced with a dilemma: either they can abandon cherished religion, or they can remain forever in the rear of human technical advance. Neither alternative is very appealing; and the tension between their desire for power and success in the modern world on the one hand, and their desire not to abandon their religion on the other, is resolvable for some only by exploding themselves as bombs. It's very difficult to understand the machinery of hatred, because you wind up resorting to logic, but trying to understand this with logic is like measuring distance in kilograms. Many in Islamic nations are envious. To them, life is an unbearable burden. Modernism is the only way out but that is frightening. It means they have to compete. It means they can't explain everything away with conspiracy theories. Talent and the free inquiry necessary to cultivate it support jealousy among the constrained. As Muslims believe they are in possession of the final revealed truth, and that they have a testament and a tradition of sayings of the prophet that in essence answer all human questions, by that light all questions ought not only to be answered but are answerable. While no doubt there are Christians and Jews who feel similar about their favored scriptures, Islam must now live in a world of competing ideas. Yet they have created societies in which it is possible, perhaps, to dispute what the Koran and Hadith mean, but not their underlying authority to answer all questions. It is still not safe in a Muslim country to say ‘There is no God and Mohammed was therefore not his prophet.’ In summary, we have: metaphysical superiority, technical and intellectual retardation, self-hatred caused by the impurity of their own desires, no practical means of escape from genuine quotidian humiliations, and the promise of rewards for their families on earth and for themselves in the outer world.
424. For much of the world, organized by tribe, people choose the strong horse over the weak horse, the goal is always to dominate your enemy and dominate the peace, and respect comes from strength and fortitude.
425. Individual ambitions and human weaknesses will never be tamed, no matter how noble the collectivist project to do so.
426. Modesty and chastity awaiting marriage are not just strategically sound and psychologically important. They are also an emblem of the unique friendship that is the union of husband and wife, in which the giving of the heart is enacted in the giving of the body, and in which the procreative fruit of their one-flesh bodily union celebrates their loving embrace not only of one another but also of their mortal condition and their capacity self-consciously to transcend it. There is no substitute for the contribution that the shared work of raising children makes to the singular friendship and love of husband and wife. Precisely because of its central procreative mission, and, even more, because children are yours for a lifetime, this is a friendship that cannot be had with any other person. Uniquely, it is a friendship that does not fly from but rather embraces wholeheartedly the finitude of its members, affirming without resentment the truth of our human condition. Not by accident does the same biblical Hebrew verb mean both to know intimately and to know the truth, including the generative truth about the meaning of being man and woman.
427. A gentleman is one who is merciful towards the absurd.
428. There is an all too common double game in academia - claims about the radical unintelligibility of “truth” to authoritative pronouncements on matters social and political.
429. In order to remain politically viable modern socialists no longer advocate direct government ownership of production. Instead, modern socialism operates on two different levels: at a personal level, it speaks to the alienation of the individual, stressing the need for caring and sharing and the politics of meaning. At a regulatory level, it seeks to identify specific sectors in which there is a market failure and then to subject them to various forms of government regulation.
430. There is no such thing as a policy solution. There is only policy trade-offs.
431. In a society which values personal freedom and autonomy, it is easy to lose sight of human dependence on others as well as the responsibilities born towards them. Humans were created as social beings who find fulfillment only in love, for God and for neighbor.
432. The downside of modern liberal democracy and capitalism is that it arouses in people the desire to live in a more "natural" un-modern way. That desire will never go away because human nature is eternal.
433. The human being is more than a thing, a means, an instrument, a non-moral, non-spirited material agent.
434. There are three basic human weaknesses: too little consciousness of the irony, tragedy, and irrepressible sinfulness of human affairs; an unrealistic appraisal of the proper role of power and self-interest in all human institutions; and a strong tendency toward rosy, gauzy hope in “progress,” including utopian fantasies about “new” types of human societies.
435. There should be an appreciation for the wisdom of ancestors and for modes of philosophical and moral thinking that complement what we know from science. Science makes a marvelous servant of humanity, but a very poor master.
436. The city of man is built on the power to put down insurrection and impose the peace.
437. Theory is gray, but green is the tree of life.
438. In the face of cultural and political currents that attempt to eliminate, or at least to obfuscate and confuse, the sexual differences written into human nature, considering them to be cultural constructions, it is necessary to recall the design of God that created the human being male and female, with a unity and at the same time an original and complementary difference. Human nature and the cultural dimension are integrated in an ample and complex process that constitutes the formation of the identity of each, where both dimensions — the feminine and the masculine — correspond to and complete each other.
439. The real philistines are not those people incapable of recognizing beauty — they recognize it only too well, with a flair as infallible as that of the subtlest aesthete, but only to pounce on it and smother it before it can take root in their universal empire of ugliness.
440. Freedom is not license; freedom must have as its end the full development in persons of what it means to be truly human.
441. Reason is a natural faculty, both empirical and thus good in the realm of science and also moral and thus sufficient for binding and foundational law; it is further an experience by which humans negotiate the tensions of existence, thus formative of order in the soul and by extension in the collective souls of a community.
442. Civilization was laboriously achieved and only precariously defended. Its defense must be fully manned, as many are gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.
443. The finest form of charity is to enable a poor man to support himself with honor and usefulness.
444. The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. Humans want their wishes to come true; they want the universe to care about them; they want the esteem of peers. For most, wanting to know the truth about the world is far down the list, and scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust.
445. Multiculturalism provides the rootless consumer, whether of cuisine or ideas, with a wide variety of lifestyle options and choices, pieces to try, taste and enjoy, and throw away. Oh, the horror of commitment to a quotidian existence! If only we could all be world travelers, unbounded by zip codes and responding with 'Earth' when asked the address of home! Multiculturalism feeds the perverse desire to crown oneself with the epithet 'itinerant,' even the bank account does not allow for such freedoms. Multiculturalism’s dramatic rise in popularity is due also to a lack real interests, as the sheen of glamour fades and a new goal must quickly be established. The goal is attained, the lifestyle is tried on and experienced, found to be as superficial and unsatisfying as the previous ends, and the peripatetic continues roving. Multiculturalism may superficially gratify restless hearts, but how many decades must be wasted before the realization that no foundation built on sand can ever support a home?
446. The most enduring forms of order are not built, but grown over time. Humans cannot always understand the advantages of the current social order.
447. There is no such thing as a “writing talent.” Anyone can be taught to write a good sentence. What writers are born with is a “third ear,” not for words but for human nature.
448. Political is boring, sanctimonious and dreary.
449. Elites generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. But it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit, is galvanized by modernization, and in one form or another, it will drive global politics for generations to come. Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic society, ethnic disaggregation or partition is often the least bad answer.
450. The goal of teaching should be to make certain that students understand the perspectives and rich debates that have shaped the dialogue of civilization, not to create disciples of a worldview. Students should learn how to read deeply, how to analyze, how to locate the essential points of similarity and divergence among thinkers, and how to understand, with intellectual empathy, how the world looks from the diverse perspectives that constitute the history of thought.
451. Humans are inclined to believe those whom they do not know because they have never deceived.
452. Language is the dress of thought; every time one talks the mind is on parade.
453. Hope is itself a species of happiness, and perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
454. Where status for the beast of the field is determined by power, for man it is determined in innumerable ways because of language. And it is language that gives man rational thought.
455. Culture cannot be entrusted to the democratic process precisely because of the carelessness with words, the habit of unthinking cliché, which always arises when every person is regarded as having an equal right to expression.
456. Someone who fails in in private life has failed in their public life, because they are the beneficiaries of a public trust which requires them to live out their daily lives during their term in office with an ounce of moral character.
457. Conservatism, by its nature, is about reform. Reform is profoundly un-radical. It is about taking existing institutions that have strayed from their original purpose, that are failing to achieve the goals they set out to achieve, and revitalizing them.
458. The basic antagonism of economic life is that work is toilsome and necessarily serves someone else’s interests.
459. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature. In seeking to relieve of prejudice, the supposedly well-meaning also seek to relieve of those unspoken commitments that families and local organizations have painstakingly sought to instill.
460. Instead of trying to achieve the ideal, instead of letting the ideal dominate, it can be best to set the ideal off on a distant plateau, give it respect, and acknowledge its beauty. Then, shake the spell off and get back to fumbling through the here and now.
461. Multiculturalism follows inexorably from the rejection of a universal human nature. If there is no single human nature, then there is no single standard for human excellence. Indeed, there is no single standard for anything, from rationality to morality. When rationality and morality are reduced to social constructions, the best humans can do is learn how societies construct things, rather than why certain constructions endure the test of time. Learning becomes a matter of uncovering the social and historical context behind every book and every idea. Rather than ask what a text has to teach, it is asked what the text is trying to hide. And the answer to that question is presupposed from the start: what is foundational to all social constructions just happens to be what is so self-congratulatory about modern education. All books and ideas are trying to hide their prejudices about race, gender, and class. Learning is about identifying with the experiences of the victims of "social injustice" - experiences that will be held up as absolutely different. All of this is profoundly anti-Christian, as Christians believe in universal human nature and universal truth claims about human nature, even as not every statement about human nature is true.
462. Marriage is an intrinsic good in itself because it bridges the difference between the sexes, uniting man and woman in one flesh. It marks a sacred rite of passage — entry into a fundamental commitment that binds the individual to a larger purpose and community. And although marriage unites two distinct and morally responsible individuals, it is no more about the individuals than it is about their union into one — a marriage that unites and transcends their individual purposes and desires, which henceforth are to be fulfilled in, through, and in concert with the other.
463. The collapse of public moral standards and the vast expansion in the notion of individual rights are make it increasingly difficult to deny right to fulfill desires, whatever they may be. In the revolt against the allegedly unjust and discriminatory authoritarianism of morality, there is lost any ground from which to draw moral lines.
464. Highly polished existentialism, radical autonomy, contempt for tradition and authority, and the elevation of youthful indulgence is more seductive than its better, reason free from passion.
465. It is difficult to face the notion that the gap between becoming who one is and being who one is rapidly closes. There is the realization that the world is not of infinite possibilities; that by one's own choices one has decisively forclosed certain avenues; and that the net effect is rapid convergence on a person one had not yet met or even imagined the existence of: oneself. It comes uninvited.
466. The sway of "theory" is terrible: a stylistically barbarous, philosophically frivolous mode of writing and thinking that reduces great art and all sorts of human achievement and historical fact to arbitrary linguistic categories and oppressive power structures. A deconstructive obsession with "difference" amounts to a betrayal of the humanities, of the students, of the university mission. The abdication of educational responsibility leaves students to their worst instincts, a juvenile nihilism and self-infatuation. Literature has the ability to express the sorrows and joys of life. It can tell truths of the human condition.
467. Legal principles are pragmatic solutions to real-world disputes.
468. Unmasking arbitrariness in others is a defense against doing so in the self.
469. Emotivism informs a great deal of contemporary moral utterance and practice, and the central characters of modern society embody such emotivist modes.
470. The nation-state is a state in which law springs from within, expressing the mutuality and the common allegiance of the people. In such a state there is a clear perception of the limits to law, and a jealous attachment to freedom. The best task is not to roll back its frontiers, but to re-establish the frontiers of the nation-state, and to reanimate the natural hostility citizens feel toward laws that are imposed by people with whom they do not belong.
471. There is a conflicting premise of decent governance: the abstract ideal of autonomy, however admirable, is radically incomplete. Individuals have free will; they can make choices, act on reasons, and are guided by conception of what exists and what is wished. Yet the form of freedom requires a content. Freedom is of no use to a being, living in a solipsistic vaccum, lacking the concepts with which to value things. The ends of conduct cannot be derived from the idea of choice alone. There must be a showing of how the agent values the intention of action. Through what concepts, and through what perceptions, is the end represented as desirable?
472. The power of tradition is twofold: it makes history into reason, and therefore the past into a present aim; second, tradition arises from every organization in society, and is no more trapping of the exercise of power. Traditions arise and command respect wherever individuals seek to relate themselves to something transcendent.
473. Words have lost their percision - not in spite of science, but because of it; not in spite of the loss of true religious belief, but because of it; not in spite of the proliferation of technical terms, but because of it. Modern ways of speaking veil the world since they convey no lived response; they are mere counters in a game of cliche, designed to fill up silence, to conceal the void.
474. Society is indeed a contract; but not a contract among the living only; rather, it is a partnership between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. And only those who listen to the dead are fit custodians of future generations.
475. Religion is the lifeblood of a culture. It provides the store of symbols, stories and doctrines that enable us to communicate about our destiny. It forms, through the sacred texts and liturgies, the constant point to which the poet and the critic can return—the language alike of ordinary believers and of the poets who must confront the ever-new conditions of life in the aftermath of knowledge, of life in a fallen world.
476. Humans can do nothing unless they first amend themselves. The task is to rediscover the world which made them, to see themselves as part of something greater, which depends upon them for its survival.
477. Secularists emphasize rights because, having rejected the idea of an objective moral order, they exalt unfettered freedom. What freedom is for merits little attention.
478. A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve is the definition of a statesman.
479. Viewing the inescapable difference between the sexes as political and pop-scientific grievance does grave harm to women.
480. Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
481. Mass immigration is class war against the domestic poor.
482. Correlation is not causality.
483. Science isn't absolute, it's relative. It's a process for increasing the relative accuracy of predictions. The more accurate compared to randomness predictions get, the more scientific they are.
484. Racism and segregation violate human dignity and restrict individual liberty and inappropriately extend state power. This is a well-defined, tangible injustice that leads to a specific solution - new laws that guarantee individual rights. Racism and segregation as an implication of society rather than a violation of individual rights are a more amorphous feeling that leads to an ever-shifting set of “solutions” that naturally create an expanded public presence in the form of new government agencies and programs. It’s not surprising that a more broad feeling of “guilt” leads to constantly evolving policy responses as its not possible to assuage a generally guilty conscience. Shifting blame from individuals to more amorphous “forces” makes it nearly impossible that the guilt will ever disappear.
485. Liberty and self-government require a cohesive culture, which in turn requires strong family ties, which in turn requires traditional morality.
486. The Kingdom of God cannot be coerced into existence by any amount of social or political effort. It remains the gift of God and of the returning Lord to a world that cannot perfect itself by its own efforts.
487. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing. It should not be written with a capital G or so as to refer to people.
488. Marriage is part of all cultures because it's both hard and necessary. It works when it's the standard solution to the problem of heterosexuality. The more distant this bedrock, the harder it is to sustain marriage culture.
489. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
490. The state must not be the means by which society could be redeemed collectively. There will never be a kingdom as the complete ideal of human society to be realized on earth. Sin is not something that is committed by a society; sin is something committed by an individual.
491. An experiment in self-government will fail if the people who constitute the political community cannot self-govern. And individuals will not adequately self-govern unless commanded by some divine, natural law.
492. Example is the school of mankind and they will learn at no other.
493. When neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content.
494. God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation, and thus the capacity and responsibility, of love and communion. Yet, some protest, it is really only power that matters. This view conceals a revolutionary expectation, one that pushes toward a humanity in which no distinction between individuals is tolerated, one where everyone performs the same functions. But this is gravely contrary to the complementarity at the heart of God's design. The harmony of the couple and of society depends in part on the way in which the complementarity, needs, and mutual support between the genders are lived. Each of the genders is an image of the power and tenderness of God, with equal dignity though in a different way.
495. A sense of grievance or entitlement, as a result of the mistreatment of ancestors, is not likely to get one very far with people who are too busy dealing with current economic and family realities to spend much time thinking about their own ancestors, much less other people’s ancestors.
496. Love of beauty and home are those motives that keep people in real and reciprocal relation with each other, whether here and now, or across the generations.
497. Despair is the parent of achievement.
498. In necessary things unity, in undecided things freedom, and in all things charity.
499. It is clear that the mandarins have a pretty good idea of just what the rhetoric of community buys them practically. Power, for one thing. When entrenched privilege finds itself threatened by new and aggressive forms of energetic activity, it typically counters the danger by using the power of the state (disguised into an agency of noblesse oblige or social solidarity) to cement an alliance with those at the bottom of the heap. Decaying patrician orders have historically maintained their preeminence by taking the lower depths in hand and giving them the benefit of a (wise and benevolent) paternal superintendence.
500. The public adores the familiar, even if all they know is that it should be familiar.
501. Many theorists are saddled with a doomed task, trying to fit the square peg of reality into the round hole of hope. Sometimes things just are what they are. And wishful theory is no match for nature’s stubborn ambition.
502. If love is true, a true thing really existing as an object to which the universe itself must bend, then there remains a place for reticence, and secrets swallowed, and the dead allowed to keep their darkness to themselves.
503. A political order must be built on an underlying reality such as kinship. Common ancestry, a common homeland and a shared history are not arbitrary. A nation is like a large, intermarrying extended family; and family ties are ties that bind. It is nearly impossible to kick someone out of your family. That is why a stable, free and democratic form of government can only be based on the shared interests of a dominant ethnic or religious group. Humans need some palpable, concrete link to each other in order to co-operate and built communities. It may not be pretty, but it is a much more stable basis for a humane society than airy words about universal human rights. Politics means working with human material as it is, not as we wish it would be. Small numbers of individuals can be adopted into the tribe, but they must intermarry and give themselves over totally to their new loyalties. Importing large numbers of minorities is a recipe for disaster. They, quite naturally, want to stick to their own kind. Once a critical mass is reached, they don't intemarry and don't assimilate, even when heavily pressured to do so. The groupness of an individual often matters more to them than their individuality. This is deeply ingrained in human nature and cannot be wished away. Any political order that tries to totally overcome this instead of working with it does so at its own peril. We cannot achieve the City of God here on earth; we can only achieve smaller, local goods. Trying to achieve the former often endagers that latter. Basing political rights on shared familial ties may not be a perfect fulfillment of the obligation to love all mankind, but it produces a concrete good which we should not blithely throw away in pursuit of heaven on earth.
504. Do not be too cavalier towards the benefits of the rule of law. Order, even an unjust order, is preferable to chaos. Slavery was unjust, yet St. Paul advised Christians to accept it. That does not mean one cannot try to change things, but it does not justify total upheaval of the temporal order. Morality demands thought, not just feeling.
505. Love involves a totality, in which all the elements of the person enter - appeal of the body and instinct, power of feeling and affectivity, aspiration of the spirit and of the will. Love aims at a deeply personal unity, a unity that, beyond union in one flesh, leads to forming one heart and soul; it demands indissolubility and faithfulness in definitive mutual giving; and it is open to fertility.
506. Most people tend away from goodness, beauty and truth and towards the simple, superficial and self-serving.
507. Any attack against hierarchy in thought or culture in service of fighting power and hierarchy is trying to establish power as a hierarch.
508. It is impossible to reason without ordering principles, and ordering principles imply hierarchy.
509. There is a universal pivot of the human will, the desire of each human to live a purposeful, and morally and intellectually consistent, life.
510. Hooked on political correctness and incapable of doing without the daily diversity fix, the universal character is regarded as an offshoot of the melting pot and the conclusion is that the reactionaries are up to their old tricks.
511. To those who despise religion and worship science, the idea of special grace is an outrage, for science is neutral with respect to all peoples and all times. Since the boast of enlightened, rational promise, many have wanted the authority to order problems according to an image of man in anything but man in the image of God.
512. Society should be seen not in terms of abstraction or slogans, but in terms of the people it produces, the energy combined with self-reliance and quirkiness.
513. Calls to indict may be a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out and ultimately to bring it down.
514. Noticing similarities and differences is one of the fundamental methods of gaining knowledge about the world. Knowledge is useful because it allows for making more accurate predictions about reality, which allows for better decisions.
515. Humans like things unpredictable, but with a comprehensible narrative logic.
516. The only thing that can stop the lethal anarchy in many neighborhoods is personal responsibility, starting with the duty of men to raise the children that they sire. What is most needed is self-control and respect for fellow human beings. There is very little the government can do to make up for those deficits. When the marriage norm has disappeared from a culture, the greatest civilizing force disappears as well. Young men who know that they can endlessly inseminate girls without getting a wife or having to support their children have no incentive to develop the stable character and work habits that would make them an attractive husband and employee. And the boys raised in those fatherless households have a much lower chance of receiving the parental discipline and guidance necessary to keep them out of trouble.
517. There are three historic cultures of the world: 1st world, which was pagan, 2nd world, which was sacred order Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, and 3rd world, which is modern and postmodern and the negation of all sacred orders.
518. Heaven is the locale of the greatest conversations, most beautiful music, and truest poetry and drama - at last, full communion.
519. Freedom and tolerance are so often separated from truth. This is fuelled by the notion that there are no absolute truths to guide our lives. Relativism, by indiscriminately giving value to practically everything, has made 'experience' all-important. Yet, experiences, detached from any consideration of what is good or true, can lead, not to genuine freedom, but to moral or intellectual confusion, to a lowering of standards, to a loss of self-respect, and even to despair.
520. Change is constant; and the great question is not whether to resist change, which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary and general doctrines.
521. All societal problems are cultural and moral; all cultural and moral problems are familial.
522. There is a long history of revolutions that refuse to acknowledge the reality of humans. Humans are irrational animals as well as intellectual creatures. Human traditions and religions evolved with them. The purposes of those traditions and religions are not easily explained. Destroy them and find out why they existed.
523. All goals, such as justice, community, and love, which make human life into a thing of intrinsic value, have origin in the mutual accountability of persons, who respond to each other I to I. Humans are thus satisfied that they understand the world and know its meaning when they can see it as the form of another I - the I of God, in which all stand judged, and from which love and freedom flow.
524. Humans have an innate need to conceptualize the world in terms of the transcendental, and to live out the distinction between the sacred and the profane. This need is rooted in self-consciousness and in the experience that remind of shared destiny. Insecurity and disorder come from the tension in which humans are held when they cannot attach inner awareness of the transcendental to the outward forms of religious ritual.
525. The Enlightenment dream that Reason alone can disclose authoritative truths to live by has been shown to have been empty. All Reason alone gives is radical subjectivity. It has shown how and why to doubt everything, but does not demonstrate why humans should believe in anything other than the truths disclosed by science - which aren't moral truths at all.
526. Specific government policies tend to matter less than the quantities and qualities of various populations.
527. If each man's morality is defined merely to suit himself, then everyone will endure the consequences of the individual's autonomously defined ethics.
528. Many defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.
529. The young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
530. Everything fails by irrevelant standards.
531. Nearly all men can stand adversity. To test a man’s character, give him power.
532. Modernism, prosperity, a fetishization of the collective, and original sin are a terribly lethal combination.
533. Only fidelity to conscience and to the wellsprings of goodness within the soul allows one to affirm the true goodness of life and the essentially moral character of human existence.
534. Some ideas are eventually undermined by a massive onslaught of circumstances with which they cannot contend.
535. Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.
536. Every nationality, every ethnicity, prefers to be misgoverned by its own people than to be well ruled by another.
537. A free-market system must not rely solely upon economics as the source of order. In this reliance lay the great mistake of nineteenth-century apologists for capitalism; in fact, only a solid social structure predicated upon individual virtue, cohesive families, and local communities could counterbalance the frequently disruptive side-effects of the dynamic, highly efficient market system. A decay in those fundamental building blocks of social order must lead to atomization, alienation and ever increasing demands for state control over the economy.
538. The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.
539. Human nature is unchanging across time and space and thus predictable.
540. Unequal outcomes are unproblematic so long as rules and barriers to entry are clear and objective. It is wrong to have different standards and barriers to entry solely based on an unchangable, inherent characteristic. To do so is to first serve ideology, in a patronizing and condescending fashion, which breeds resentment and legitimate insecurity.
541. Humans have liberated fantasy but killed imagination, and so have sealed themselves in selfishness and loneliness. Fantasy is of the solitary self, and it cannot lead away from self. It is by imagination that humans cross over the differences between themselves and other beings and thus learn compassion, forbearance, mercy, forgiveness, sympathy, and love.
542. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
543. Morality is any system of interlocking values, practices, institutions, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.
544. It is comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all voters have to do is make sure they don’t put psychotics in high places and problems can be solved.
545. There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just.
546. One of the objects of a mature political philosophy is to reconcile people to the painful limitations of their condition.
547. Poetry should stand for a principle of order in the human soul, in society and in the universe. The old poetic culture of the West, with its emphasis on harmony, proportion, and order, brought coherence to the world and did much to reconcile men and women to the larger rhythms of life. The roots of this culture grew out of the Greek belief that poetry and music, together with rhythm and harmony, powerfully influence the mind and are therefore one of the bases of civilization. If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.
548. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
549. For much of humanity, morality is genetic affinity plus expedience plus quid pro quo plus self-serving status posturing.
550. Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.
551. The spending of a population is based on its wealth. In the long run, its wealth is mostly a function of its human capital - the population's ability to earn money. It is important to not debauch the average human capital of a population.
552. Conscience is the mind thinking morally. It is the human ability to reason not just logically or pragmatically, but according to the categories of right and wrong, and of good, better and best. It is practical moral knowledge.
553. No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
554. Information is different from knowledge, and it has nothing at all to do with wisdom.
555. False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
556. The tension between dead hope and unwelcome reality is acute, resolvable only, as is always the case with such psychic stresses, by doublethink.
557. Culture is, first and foremost, a normative order by which humans comprehend themselves, others, and the larger world and through which they order experience.
558. To hold together a multiethnic or multilingual state, either an authoritarian regime or a dominant ethnocultural core is essential. Mass immigration benefits the ruling elites economically by crippling the middle class and depreciating the price of labor, politically by supplying statist voters, and culturally by deracinating the ethnocultural core. Mass immigration, particularly of incompatible newcomers, is a classic divide-and-conquer strategy of the ruling classes.
559. College bottles up thousands of hormone infused, immature youths in one place, gives them all the comforts of life for free, and requires virtually nothing of the student in return. It's a perfect recipe for creating spoiled brats.
560. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
561. Condemning people in the past is a way of misplacing guilt, a way of saying, "I’m morally superior to you," so as to feel better and not own up to personal, current sins.
562. Indispensable social institutions, such as marriage, really are rooted in biological imperatives. Humans really are belonging and begetting beings - social animals, and a lot of our happiness comes from following natural, social inclinations.
563. Anarchists are leftists who are mad at government because they are not in charge. Anarchism is especially appealing to youths because they have so little power and such low status. People have instinctive desire for power and status, hence the violence.
564. Inequality is inherent in human life.
565. The emphasis on the individual has been at the expense of the associative and symbolic relationships that must in fact uphold the individual’s sense of integrity. Once, both human material and spiritual needs had been met by non-state institutions. The family was a locus of identity, as well as the vital economic base for food, housing, and education. Churches and guilds provided economic support as well as creating identity. When the expanding liberal nation-state began to usurp economic functions, and to perform them more efficiently, people no longer turned to these intermediate institutions. Without the strong connection of physical need, bonds between individuals and institutions grew tenuous and no longer created meaning and community.
566. Natural law, which is at the root of the recognition of true equality between persons and peoples, deserves to be recognized as the source that inspires the relationship between the spouses in their responsibility for begetting new children. The transmission of life is inscribed in nature and its laws stand as an unwritten norm to which all must refer.
567. Culture matters. How humans talk about society helps form society. And the kind of society humans have places enormous constraints on economic mechanisms and the economic expectations and ambitions of individuals and the public.
568. Success is when opportunity meets preparation.
569. Terrorism is a tactic, a technique, a weapon that fanatics, dictators and warriors have resorted to through history. If war is the continuation of politics by other means, terrorism is the continuation of war by other means. Yet terrorism – the killing of innocents for political ends – can only triumph if the aggrieved play the role the terror masters have scripted for them in their bloody drama.
570. Children are the living messages humans send to a time they will not see.
571. A social order has to have something in it that inspires love.
572. Folly’s reservoir never runs dry.
573. Civilizations exist because men wish to overcome death, and have learned that ties of blood and language are not sufficient to win immortality. They require a form of social organization that rises above mere ethnicity, that promises a higher form of continuity between the dead and the yet unborn. But supplanting the ties of blood and language is a daunting task at which most civilizations ultimately fail. Mortality becomes nearly unbearable in the face of modernity.
574. To overcome mortality humans create culture, a dialogue among generations that links the dead with the yet unborn. Without the hope of immortality they cannot bear mortality. Cultures that have lost the hope of immortality also lose the will to live.
575. Islam parodies Christianity. Christianity proposes to incorporate all of humanity into the new People of God, by effecting an inner transformation of every individual. By this transformation, Christians believe, all of humanity can become holy. Islam offers a universal religion not of inner transformation, but of obedience. Precisely this form of surface universalism ensures that Muslims carry the baggage of traditional life into the new religion, for it offers no point of departure from traditional society. As a universal religion, Islam can only universalize the aspirations of the tribes it assimilates, rather than transform them, and cannot rid itself of its pagan heritage. Instead, it lashes out against the encroachment of more adaptive civilizations.
576. The pitting of freedom against truth is the original sin of the liberalism. The truth about freedom is that there is no freedom apart from truth.
577. Whenever orthodoxy becomes optional, it will sooner or later be proscribed.
578. There is a decisive importance of civil society for a flourishing social order, and above all for the poor. The weakening of mediating institutions like the family, church, vibrant neighborhoods, and voluntary associations, which form our moral affinities grant fortitude and character to live meaningful lives as citizens, empower not people but the suffocating bureaucratic state. A democracy without civil society will soon be no democracy at all.
579. Women often hate working for other women. While men compete for status by trying to include as many underlings as possible in their hierarchies, women gain prestige by excluding the maximum number from their cliques.
580. The less humans deserve good fortune, the more they hope for it.
581. Enforced egalitarianism entails the death of excellence. It seizes the rewards that excellence earns and turns them over to politicians and bureaucrats for distribution to the mediocrities upon whose votes they depend.
582. The companion of autonomy is loneliness.
583. Religion seems to be intuitive belief in some sort of presiding, which seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature; this intuition has intersected, historically, with an enormous amount of subjective religious experience; and this intersection (along with the force of custom and tradition) has produced and sustained the religious traditions.
584. To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.
585. Habits become character.
586. The world is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel.
587. When a society loses its memory, it descends inevitably into dementia.
588. If you would civil your land, first you should civil your speech.
589. Charisma is the ability to make other people wholeheartedly buy into narcissism.
590. Politics is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
591. Children are the wealth of nations, provided that their nations can put tools in their hands and the rule of law at their back. Countries that lack children are poor.
592. Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
593. It is a weakness of human nature to imagine the most antagonistic motives of another person if what that person says is not thematically consistent with the narrative playing out in one’s head.
594. Unintended consequences predominate in education because the reigning dogma of the education industry — the intellectual equality of all students — is wrong. This obdurate refusal on the part of everybody who is anybody in the education business to admit publicly the manifold implications of some kids being smarter than others makes it difficult to get anything done in the real world.
595. Grace must wound before it can heal.
596. Marriage as an individual right offers no cultural basis for helping people answer the questions that matter most.
597. Homogeneity evokes loyalty, stability and harmony.
598. The health of a nation is inversely proportional to the number of laws needed to govern it.
599. One cannot be a conservative and an uncritical admirer of free market capitalism, which is the most revolutionary force ever known.
600. Humans must adapt to changing times with unchanging principles.
601. Children are our wealth, and families its custodian.
602. Ideas create idols; only wonder leads to knowing.
603. The ceaseless labor of life is to build the house of death.
604. Creative art arises from participation in the mind of God.
605. To destroy the morality of a people is to completely break their will, to prepare the conditions through which they will happily submit to the most degrading slavery if it means they will have a steady supply of the poisons of their choice.
606. Contrary to the Enlightenment mentality, human beings are ritual creatures; they don't by nature simply feel or experience the divine; they ritualize it. Cultures have their times and seasons, their rituals and festivals, to mark major stages in human life: birth, marriage, death, harvest, victory, loss. So when human beings' rituals get changed, it hurts. With reference to Christianity, the times and seasons and rituals mark and make . The liturgy in particular goes back to the Last Supper, the synagogue, the Jewish Temple, the tabernacle, and ultimately Eden. Eden is actually a temple of the divine presence, the Tabernacle was the locus of the divine presence, and Solomon's temple and the second temple were built to reflect Eden and thus be the locus of the divine presence, and synagogues were representative of and oriented to the Jerusalem temple.
607. Much of modernity is deadly, as one cannot ultimately separate form and content. Form is essential, not accidental.
608. Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.
609. Conflicts in a striving meritocracy can probably be managed more easily where there are groups whose membership of the nation is ambiguous, who are very dependent on elite sponsorship, and whose presence flushes out ethnocentric responses among the masses which can then be held against them. A society tied to the notion of meritocracy may therefore have a particular need for minorities.
610. True knowledge is ignorance. To proclaim one’s ignorance sincerely is to remain open to one’s historical, cultural, and cosmological place. Admitting one’s indebtedness requires a healthy dose of humility.
611. Liberalism depends on the modernist conviction that neither religion nor tradition nor inherited loyalties has any binding authority. Anything that denies equal freedom is to be condemned as oppressive and marginalized, even outlawed. This is liberalism's "tyranny." Having abandoned the idea that the Good stands outside the individual's judgment, common life becomes a matter of negotiating preferences and satisfying wants.
612. Humans differ from each other in various ways because of different genotypes. Differences include, but are not limited to, physical appearance, athletic ability, personality, and cognitive abilities.
613. The law is the place where morality meets custom, and compromise, and common sense.
614. Orators are most vehement when their cause is weak.
615. Whatever fortune has raised to a height, she has raised only to cast it down.
616. The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
617. Monopolies produce high prices and low quality. This is especially true of the government supported monopolies of corporatism.
618. In order to live well, humans must work to bring habits to accord with reflective beliefs.
619. Knowledge is important not when it first becomes available but when an audience becomes available to absorb and act on the knowledge.
620. The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.
621. The results of cognitive testing are an important reality, not because they predict everything perfectly, but because they predict better than anything else, and because they are consequential for so many areas of life.
622. A movement in thought or art produces its best work during the uphill fight to oust the enemy; that is, the previous thought or art. Victory brings on imitation and ultimately Boredom.
623. Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.
From:
Elizabeth Anscombe, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Augustine, Marcus Aurelius, Jacques Barzun, Frederic Bastiat, Hilaire Belloc, William F. Buckley, Jr., Edmund Burke, G.K. Chesterton, Cicero, Anthony Daniels, Fyodor Dostoevsky, T.S. Eliot, Benjamin Franklin, Johann Goethe, Romano Guardini, Friedrich Hayek, Christopher Hitchens, Paul Johnson, Samuel Johnson, Russell Kirk, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Abraham Lincoln, Henri de Lubac, Joseph de Maistre, Harvey Mansfield, Richard John Neuhaus, John Henry Newman, Robert Nisbet, Michael Oakshott, Pierre Manent, Plato, Joseph Ratzinger, Philip Reiff, Wilhelm Röpke, Roger Scruton, Socrates, Thomas Sowell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Pyotr Stolypin, David Stove, Thucydides, Alexis de Tocqueville, Evelyn Waugh, Richard Weaver, Karol Wojtyla
Gorgias
"But now, splendidly, everything had become clear. The enemy at last was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off. It was the Modern Age in arms. Whatever the outcome there was a place for him in that battle."
Evelyn Waugh
"The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a 'warm body' democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction....Once a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader — the barbarians enter Rome."
Robert Heinlein
1. It is culture, not politics, which determines the success of a society. Politics can help to change a culture and save it from itself.
2. The state expands when the civil society contracts. When individuals stop acting responsibly, government feels the need to step in and pick up the slack. The greatest invitation to statism is a society that won't take care of itself.
3. The way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds.
4. The behavior of an organization can best be predicted by assuming it to be controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.
5. Everyone is a traditionalist in their area of expertise.
6. Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. It is important to develop alternatives to existing policies and to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.
7. Nothing is as important for freedom as recognizing in the law each individual’s natural right to property, and giving individuals a sense that they own something that they are responsible for.
8. It is not the personal that is political, but the political that is personal. People with unusually thin skins ascribe the small insults, humiliations, and setbacks consequent upon human existence to vast and malign political forces; and, projecting their own suffering onto the whole of mankind, conceive of schemes, usually involving violence, to remedy the situation that has so wounded them.
9. Finite, relative problems can be solved; infinite, absolute problems cannot be solved. In other words, human beings will never create a society which is free from contradictions.
10. Whatever a man prefers to God, that he makes a god to himself.
11. In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself.
12. Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
13. Some things are meant to be known, not understood.
14. One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances.
15. Ideology, fear, envy, and utopianism are the causes of war.
16. The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.
17. Facts do not 'speak for themselves.' They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
18. The march of science and technology does not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people. It often means the opposite.
19. In literature, importance is not important, only good writing is.
20. Most unhappily the world took a wrong turn in the road: the secularist Renaissance of the fifteenth century threw weak man on his own feeble resources; the Protestant revolt of the sixteenth, divided his soul; the Rationalism of the eighteenth, blinded it; the Liberalism and Naturalism of the nineteenth sold it to the sinister powers of matter, greedy commercialism, base pleasure, and passion, and now, by a historical consequence, we reap a harvest of dragons amid the nightmare of a barbarous and universal war.
21. There is no such thing as a lost cause because there is no such thing as a gained cause.
22. Patriotism is devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.
23. In multiracial societies, citizens do not vote in accordance with economic and social interests but in accordance with race and religion.
24. Man in this world cannot make his will his law without any regard to limits and the fixed nature of things.
25. There exists a transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society.
26. Human beings, or governments, are not black boxes engaged in a competition of interests. What matters most is the character of the individual, the character of the community and the character of government. When designing policies, it's most important to get them to complement, not undermine, people's permanent moral aspirations - the longing for freedom, faith and family happiness.
27. Existing communities have legitimate expectations which take precedence over the demands of strangers. There may be duties of charity toward strangers, but charity is a gift, and there is no right to receive it, still less to force it from those reluctant to give.
28. True neighborhood associations – like all voluntary and contractual associations – are built upon the very same institutional foundations as markets: private property and voluntary exchange protected by the rule of law. Where these institutions are protected, markets develop and rule economic affairs. At the same time, the existence of these institutions allows for individuals and families to band together in voluntary associations to provide for many of the goods that pure economic exchange does not. This sort of private ordering is the heart and soul of civil society. It cannot be duplicated by government.
29. Rhetoric is an ethical as well as an instrumental discipline. A debasement of language is also a debasement of reality. Some words are god terms which can validate almost anything. These words become unassailable, as do the causes attached to them.
30. Envy plus rhetoric equals “social justice.”
31. Knowledge and accomplishment are not democracies and society does need, and require, an aristocratic intellectual class, but one formed by the ancient classics.
32. Democracy, Immigration, Multiculturalism – pick any two.
33. Religion is a social and not merely an individual institution. In the formation of social institutions the past is our indispensable teacher. Tradition matters not merely because it is the beginning but because what past generations have discovered and passed to us is valuable. Religious institutions are central to culture’s traditions; they are inseparable from its political and social health.
34. The professoriate has been given the greatest luxury society can offer: studying beauty. All that they needed to do to justify that privilege was to help their students see why they should fall on bended knee before Plato, Dante, Di Vinci, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and so on, in thanks for lifting us out of our usual stupidity and dullness. Instead, they set themselves up as more important than the literature and art that it was their duty to curate and created a tangle of anti-humanistic nonsense that merely licensed students' ignorance.
35. An intellectual is someone who cares more about ideas than people. An intellectual is a person knowledgeable in one field who only speaks out in others, and a successful academic may be able to use his success to reach the general public on matters about which he is an idiot. A public intellectual is either an expert working dutifully within the confines of his expertise or a fool at best and fraud at worst.
36. The skepticism of intellectuals means that they are wont to look suspiciously upon any idea that does not first flatter them into believing that they are central to its realization.
37. It should not pass our notice that almost all of our so-called iconoclasts are not so bold as to smash the idols of this age, in whose presence they are wont to grovel, but rather are only so bold as to make great play of pulverizing the already smashed idols of another.
38. Many of the faults and follies of the world have arisen and flourished because of the desperate attempt by fools to eschew what they believe fools believe.
39. The human psyche is fundamentally rational, but with zones of commitment fenced off from the ordinary rules of evidence and logic. These zones are chiefly race, religion, and innate genetic difference.
40. There is too little reading in the world and too much writing. People do not willingly read if they can have any thing else to amuse them. To write well, one must read good writing.
41. The corporeal is the mysticism of the materialist.
42. Voluntary community associations organically formed and grounded in the nuclear family are the best protections of individual liberty.
43. Most people are not rational. They are tribal.
44. Propaganda and morale are as important as military superiority.
45. Capitalism is a useful means of economic wealth creation but a poor means of healthy and lasting social organization.
46. Commoditification outside of created goods is dehumanizing. Individualism is a fetish devoid of the goodness humanity may access.
47. Tradition, custom, and social cohesion are necessary to convey norms and reign in the excesses of public markets.
48. The unitary state must never be trusted. Constitutions are useless without strong, local, voluntary institutions that exist outside the jurisdiction of politics.
50. We must bring to our private lives the love of human beings, which is inseparable from the belief that all human life is inherently valuable and was created in the image of divinity.
51. There is always present the cancer of human vice rooted in selfishness and the ultimately pointless search for status.
52. The human race is a tragic, comic mixture of decency and wickedness, whose inconsistencies make for literature and the possibility of redemption.
53. In the name of individualism, liberty, equality, the free market, science, and progress, modern society has undermined families, kinship groups, churches, and other regional associations to which humans should be loyal.
54. In the quest for personal liberty, humans appeal for deliverance to the nation-state, which alone has the power to challenge and suppress. In the exchange for deliverance, allegiance is transferred to the state. Ties are then severed to local institutions that provide meaning and purpose, moral guidelines and restraint. Stripped of these, the restoration of community is sought through mass politics. Community is then defined, perversely, as political power through collective association.
55. War is the primary means of expanding state power, which upends traditional loyalties and institutions. It lessens intervening authorities between the state and the citizen.
56. The irreducible unit of civil law is not the individual citizen. There are multiple social units, each with sovereignty within its sphere of legitimate authority. The common and final is the natural rights of men, represented by the family, upon which all others are based. Pluralistic authority within the nation-state must be lodged in institutions, not the individual or civil government. There is no final earthly authority.
57. A functional pluralism of covenant best maintains civil liberty. Intermediate institutions – church, voluntary associations, family, and kinship groups – keep the state from tyranny.
58. If divine temporal sovereignty is not represented, the possibility of unnecessary conflict is lessened. Final temporal sovereignty in a sanctions-bringing institution is always operational and scornful of vital intermediate institutions such as church and family.
59. Final sovereignty should rest not in the state but in the natural rights of citizens. The twin doctrine of the rights of individuals and the centralized state as the protector of individual rights is the road to terror. A final sovereignty that rests in the state or in the individual conscience marginalizes the institutions and customs necessary to maintain the freedom of conscience.
60. Covenant, not contract, is the best central political and legal organization of community. Covenant is permanently binding and immune from annulment or revision except by specific custom.
61. All things good are as difficult as they are rare.
62. Market utopianism, assertive lifestyle individualism, and celebration of consumerism will always be inadequate to address the innate desire for meaning, solidarity, and common purpose that modern commercial society must prepare for.
63. Societal central planning is irresponsible because humans are severely limited in knowledge. Our knowledge is bigoted, dispersed, and fragmented, wholly unavailable to society at large, governmental representatives, and would-be experts. Much of it, in fact, is embodied in habit and practice unfit to convey in explicit propositional form.
64. There must be consistent resistance to the pleasant illusion that social problems can be solved through education. The cause of most national social problems is too little marriage and too much illegitimacy.
65. The first and chief responsibility of the state is the physical protection of citizens. Citizenship must be earned by a subjection of personal preference to the healthy norms of community.
66. As individuals distance themselves from the positive, traditional norms – viewed as remnants of a discredited past – fanaticism, nihilism, and cultural pessimism fill the void. Social disruption is then a means to seize power and fortune as an apocalyptic mood and calls for purifying upheavals devolve into a new civic religion.
67. It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.
68. Forbid less; demand more.
69. Civilization has been built on bloody conquest. It has also been built and maintained by willingness to both kill and sacrifice oneself to evade bloody conquest. This is part of our nature and part of what built the shining cities which dot our weary world.
70. The fetish of egalitarianism has initiated much harm. Two cherished ideals are contradictory: first that ability should be fully employed and fairly rewarded, and second that all are metaphysically equal in ability, with observed differences mere illusions and likely arising from some malign intent on the part of the observer.
71. Electoral democracy is problematic in a multicultural society, as there is strong temptation to vote for representatives of your own cultural group.
72. The notion that the human species can be improved in any large way, and that humans are capable of living in harmony, is a deeply dangerous idea.
73. Our lives do not belong to us. We are under the sway of Powers that transcend human reason.
74. If there are neither true nor false judgments, man is no longer held accountable. Without universal foundations, morality is impossible.
75. Ideology, not faith or national custom, destroys cooperative consensus. Ideology is the enemy of personal and political freedom, religion, patriotism, and tradition. Pluralism sourced in tradition is an essential means to pursue the truths that imperfect humans perceive through a glass darkly.
76. Repentance and self-limitation must be the foundation of human existence. Any means of personal definition must never be exalted above humility and self-sacrifice.
77. As society gradually solves problems of basic survival and reduces other miseries of the human condition, the fringe elements of that society feel an increasingly strong compulsion to become obsessively angry about ever more trivial causes to recapture the sense that life is a painful struggle.
78. Wise behavior and good conduct secure economic well-being. Disintegrating families invite the waste of public funds and policy gimmicks.
79. Those cultures with a history of liberty that are infected with the pandemic of self-aggrandizement and lust have forgotten that the family, not the individual, is the base unit of society.
80. We must be concerned with how to transmit values. There is a crude commercial culture that states there is little more to life than consumption. Yet there are deep ties and obligations across generations. These are much more satisfactory than the thin freedoms of mobility.
81. The flesh is the test of the spirit.
82. Total loyalty is possibly only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
83. The state which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing a suffering person needs: a loving, personal concern.
84. There is a bedrock materiality that underlies all humanity. It is not constructed performance but rather a groundwork of inherent values across cultures. All efforts to create human flourishing must coincide with this need to be loved, recognized, and a part of meaningful work.
85. The disappearance of nations would impoverish no less than if all humanity became alike, with one personality and one face. Nations are the wealth of mankind; they are its collective personalities. The very least of them wears its own special colors and bears within itself a unique facet of divine intention.
86. Land has been the main source of wealth since pre-modern times, and it has always belonged to tribes, families, or individuals, unless monopolized by monarchs. To compel people to give up what they own and surrender their private interests to the state requires violence as a routine means of governance.
87. A transcendent moral order is aided by a natural organic state, not an artificial one based on planning. Society cannot be planned and precision engineered like a machine, which is rigid, repetitive, and tends to break down. Organic life is flexible, adaptable, self-perpetuating, and based on the realities of evolutionary nature. Artificial, highly-planned states and the multinational firms that advance their power treat humans as little more than components.
88. Strong government need not be intrusive or large. It is an error to make government both large and weak, which is ineffectual and unworthy of public respect. Large-scale governmental power must defend national interests and provide citizens with the services they demand in the most efficient manner possible – little else.
89. All societies are based on a particular view of human nature.
90. People are not equal, interchangeable units of production and consumption. Differences of race, nationality, culture, gender, and ability are not obstacles to social harmony that must be removed. Citizens must never feel compelled to conform to any model of an ideal society.
91. Public affections begin in families. Our distinctive identities require that humans rightly love their kin above all strangers. Charity arises from the home.
92. All societies are a contract between the living, the dead, and those yet born. Individuals are parts of a larger body which will continue after individual death.
93. The manners and morals of a nation, codified chiefly by its religious and political institutions and its social structure, are prescribed by its past.
94. There is moral equality of mankind that is to be found by virtue in all conditions. Yet any political program of egalitarianism is treacherous. First, it is unjust because such a program would rely upon compulsion and encourage envy. Second, it would move masses downward as upward mobility is impossible because of genetic inequality. Defying nature is unworkable.
95. Ambitious elites deploy the rallying cry of equality as a pretext to reallocate resources for themselves. Abstract principles, however appealing, cannot be applied directly to solve any real political problem.
96. Humans are tied to a family, a locality, and a nation. These societies are not mechanistic; they are organic because the present and future are inseparable.
97. Wisdom and prejudice are often synonyms. The origin of prejudice, its nature and function, are the collective experiences of the past which contain much wisdom. The longer they have lasted, the more they prevail and the more they must be cherished. When feelings contradict theories, the feelings are true and the theories are false.
98. Liberty is seldom derived from universal principles. It is the legacy of the hard-won battles of ancestors. Imposing liberty upon other lands is exceedingly difficult challenge made impossible by any uprising supported by the local populace. Such a fight would require a level of frightfulness that does not merit close inspection.
99. The ideal political party is one comprised of firm and determined patriots who manage the state based upon the morals of continuity.
100. Leisure and relaxation are desirable because those who always labor have no true judgment. It is necessary to survey completed work and to plan for the future by the past.
101. Human beings prefer to be misgoverned by people like themselves, rather than wisely, fairly, and honestly ruled by the Other or the Other’s stooges.
102. The energy that shapes world events springs from the innate emotions of tribal pride and religious belief. These must never be considered anachronisms.
103. Other peoples do not wish to be like ourselves. To base action on this assumption is to undergo a fit of absence of mind.
104. Do not mistake solemnity for significance.
105. We must avoid the use of the language of ethics as a tool for self-interest.
106. Liberty without virtue is greatest of all possibly evils. Virtue does not exist without the free choice of what is good. Although humans are not determined creates, we are conditioned ones. Human persons have not only a conditioned free will but a conditional one. We must avoid the extremes of determinism and fatalism and a radical, post-moral self-will.
107. A rejection of the idea that the self is internally structured by conscience is a rejection of truth on behalf of emotional egalitarianism.
108. Egalitarianism, democracy, and pantheism are lethal toxins without manners and mores.
109. When words become a test for virtue, they also serve as a mask for vice. This is why sanctimony and ruthless self-interest are such powerful allies.
110. It is uncomfortable to discuss the constraints of culture because of the fetish for multiculturalism and the stubborn insistence to see the world through the prism of class.
111. Much of modern life is wholly unnatural and therefore insufficient for the nourishment of the human soul.
112. The only part of any religion that is empirically verifiable is original sin.
113. An education that is only negative, that only questions assumptions and received wisdom, is destructive to the social fabric.
114. It is best to follow leaders who might show us better versions of ourselves. There are many false and angry gods who would distract us from cultural decay. The communion of minds and the collective memory of a society are kept alive and healthy by an understanding of and respect for enduring and profitable prejudices.
115. The best way to defeat status-seeking outrage among those seeking to achieve victim status is to demonstrate status high enough so that one’s position cannot be affected. Impotent outrage is the quickest to dissipate.
116. The issue is not the existence of planning, but whether it should be accomplished centrally or divided among many individuals.
117. The intellectual foundations of Western civilization are the Christian ethic, the scientific spirit, and the rule of law.
118. A market economy incorporates an unimaginably large number of personal decisions based on an even greater number of individual preferences, and does so with accuracy through the price mechanism. The system is often unfair but remains preferable to all alternatives.
119. A well ordered society exhibiting rational coordination among its members need not be a designed and commanded order.
120. Legitimate government actions are those that adhere to the principle of equality before the law. This takes root infrequently and must be carefully guarded.
121. Abstract rules of just conduct, which is the ideal, require agreement of and confidence in values.
122. The organic growth of socially beneficial customs and tradition is a rare and valuable thing. If they decay, there is no way that legislation can replace them. They arise spontaneously or not at all.
123. The bonds of history, territory, language, and allegiance hold a society together. Only when there is a sense of membership are people disposed to submit to a common rule of law and willing to place contractual obligations to strangers above family and tribe.
124. Excessive emphasis on the free and sovereign individual frays the necessary bonds of community and tradition. And the heavily interventionist state undermines these traditions further. This is why civilized order is a rare achievement in human history. The goal of any political leadership must be to give a coherent and humane account of the kind of pre-political membership that will sustain free institutions and a rule of law. This essential loyalty cannot be replaced without cost by relations of a purely contractual kind.
125. Modernism was a kind of architectural Protestantism that sought to “cleanse” its version of sacred space from the corruptions of Genius. Buildings were to be monuments to the genius of the modernism architect rather than to the glories of Greece, Rome, or God. This “rationalist” turn of mind does not uplift the soul. Modernism appeals to the forbidding chill and soulless slab of staid bureaucracies, not to a public sense of beauty.
126. A war of ideas is not an intellectual process; it is a political one often corrupted by the games demonstrating of moral superiority.
127. The self is diminished, not fulfilled, when intimacy is separated from love. To give our lives meaning, it is necessary to make commitments to each other. These define us. Mores and manners have everything to do with what distinguishes us as human. No amount of cultural programming can ever deny that we have higher desires than those of the body.
128. It is poverty to in the name of openness and personal expression cast aside the wisdom of convention as repressive and meaningless.
129. Seemingly new social models such as modernism or cultural revolution embrace egalitarianism and the fall of boundaries under the false pretense that we may bend reality and human nature according to our own desires. In the end there is the emotional emptiness of the noncommittal, the ever changing, and the isolated.
130. To be nonjudgmental is a poor virtue where there are limitless choices and the inability to weigh one against the other. The refined capacity for judgment is an attractive quality.
131. A world without consequences is a destructive lie. Freed from the restrictions of convention, we do not satisfy our every desire and increase the store of human happiness. The emotional, the moral, and the physical consequences make us yearn for the order and restraint of traditional social forms.
132. The common good is achieved first by the principle of association, which are the little platoons of families and neighborhoods.
133. Science beyond its appropriate bounds is the chief thread to allegiance of the principle of human equality. Science demonstrates that we are not equal in our natural capacities. Groups of humans scattered around the world are very different in capabilities, attitudes, and behaviors. Many of these differences are genetically mediated and cannot be altered by education. We are equal, however, in our standing as human beings in relation to something higher than ourselves.
134. People will not follow abstract theories. They will behave in ways that promoted the survival of generations of their ancestors.
135. Starting with limitless freedom ends with total despotism.
136. Transnational pathologies cannot seep across borders without a loss of confidence that there is something worth assimilating toward.
137. The significant task is not just to criticize power, but to exercise it well and with restraint. The integration of art and life is not a grubby compromise if the task is to bring art and knowledge into fruitful engagement with experience.
138. Those overwhelmed by hate cherish it as a badge of moral superiority.
139. In building grand projects for the purification of humanity, ordinary life and the ordinary people who live it all too often become dispensable.
140. There is a transcendent order that rules society and conscience.
141. Humans have attachment to the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence even as they stand against the leveling forces of modern society.
142. Civilized society requires orders and classes. A free and civilized society requires freedom and faith in custom and convention, a distrust of sophists, calculators, and economists who would reconstruct society upon abstract design. It requires a wariness of innovation and a recognition that prudent innovation is the means of social preservation.
143. The idea of natural right asserts knowledge and virtue as a sturdy foundation of a well-ordered society.
144. The more you socialize the costs of personal and family autonomy, the more license you give others to regulate it.
145. Ordeal comes before dominion.
146. Belonging comes before belief.
147. Race and gender have more to do with biology than with literature or theory.
148. Concerns of family, illegitimacy, divorce, and marriage are at the root of most poverty.
149. To have moral realism is to resist living a life of ideology, with its special form of unconsciousness and risk of becoming an agent to evil.
150. Not every good fight is a millennial fight, a twilight struggle.
151. For all the fealty to historical materialism, political movements rise to power not on the wings of theory but through the politics of irreducible choice.
152. You cannot have democratic accountability in anything bigger than a nation state.
153. Human nature has no history.
154. Every man who knocks on the door of a brothel is looking for God.
155. The religious impulse cannot be suppressed.
156. Most evil is banal and committed by ordinary people choosing their appetites and habits, not a splendid and Miltonic fall of a few grand and tragic choices. It consists of a steady stream of small-time compromises, petty sins, and small steps downward. Hell is repetition, where the same pattern of choices are reasserted and no sin is an island.
157. Reason does not lead to the dead end of atheism and rebellion against God; properly employed, it leads to a well-governed life where suffering and evil can be mitigated and confined to bearable proportions. Sensible policy, achieved on the basis of consent, is possible if the constitutional order is well designed, and if the people have sufficient virtue.
158. Every living creature must possess some spiritual dynamic, which provides the energy necessary for that sustained social effort which is civilization. Normally this dynamic is supplied by a religion, but in exceptional circumstances the religious impulse may disguise itself under philosophical or political forms.
159. The truth of the self-sufficient soul coexists with the truth of the vital importance of human connections.
160. Every man is a reactionary in the subject of his knowledge.
161. Great critics have no theory. Those who adopt a theory are imitating somebody else. All useful criticism is based upon experience of living. Just as wisdom is personal, there is no method except the self.
162. Because there are pockets of ambiguity does not mean there are not fields of clarity.
163. We must depend on education, tradition, belief, and prejudice, the products of culture which are inherited wisdoms and experiences, because our power of reason has limits.
164. The task of critical reason is to peer through the cultural web in which we are enmeshed so as to perceive clearly the reality that exists, including the man-made reality of the social order, whose terms give our lives meaning. Yet when questioning our culturally created assumptions to clear away attitudinizing or propaganda or superstitious prejudice, it must be recognized that human nature is not man-made and society cannot be molded at will.
165. We cannot live justly and happily unless we live under a power out of ourselves, a power above us, transcendent over our wills and our choices. Human government is not viable or sufficient without divine government above it in some unspecified relationship.
166. A non religious principle, replacing God, that is truly transcendent and not a tool of our passions does not exist. It is the power of the human desire for justice, so often partisan and perverted, that turns men into fanatics. The strength of religion is to recognize two apparently contrary forces in the human soul: the power of injustice and the power of our desire for justice. The stubborn existence of injustice reminds us that man is not God, while the demand for justice reminds us that we wish for the divine. Religion tries to join these two forces together.
167. Humans like to interact most with people like themselves, and they will develop institutions to allow them to do so.
168. Genetic differences between human groups, and in particular differences in average native intelligence, has been an important factor in human history.
169. Competitive moralism, of which we see too much, is driven by something amoral and animalistic: it is the age-old struggle for supremacy, the competition of rivals, placed in more respectable terms. The struggle becomes absurd — not in its underlying aims which are ever natural — but in the ever greater distance between high claims and base motives, wherewith the only point is in outdoing one’s rivals in “goodness” whilst not actually caring a damn whether anything good will come of it. Intellectual life — that supposedly higher sphere and haven from beastly struggle — becomes diseased with it, even such that, in terrible and political times, there is a delirium of the senses, and a dulling of the faculties, except for the primitive and still acute instincts for success.
170. Relativism is the compliment that desperation pays to failing ideas.
171. Tribal particularities are far more powerful than ideologiocal abstractions.
172. Discontent is the parent of all radicalism.
173. The natural family is the fundamental social unit, inscribed in human nature. It is centered around the voluntary union of a man and a woman in a lifelong covenant for the purpose of satisfying the longings of the human heart to give and receive love, welcoming and ensuring the full physical and emotional development of children.
174. Military strength is necessary to preserve peace, and the war-fighting potential of a democracy is at its greatest when war is most intense and at its weakest when war is most limited.
175. Strong nuclear families are the basis of any good society.
176. Law and order are the first duty of the state.
177. Every age has its compensations. Youth has innocence; adulthood has power; age has wisdom.
178. Access, proximity, and personality matter more in upward social mobility than what is known.
179. There are no inevitable courses of events powerless to human planning and reason. It is not right that what in history is known to us is called laws of inevitability, and what is unknown is called free will. Reason does not lead to the dead end of atheism and rebellion. Properly employed, it leads to a well-governed order, a well-tempered religion, and a well-governed life. Suffering may be mitigated and curbed, confined to bearable proportions.
180. Guidance by will and not by reason cannot lead to a more accurate understanding of human nature, a sound guide for human life and self-governance. Therefore an ideal system is private property rights and a prudent mixture of hereditary monarchy and representative government grounded in local communities. This will allow for a landed class of hard-working, independent-minded, and politically responsbile workers tied to the land who may become the foundation of society. They will have both the power and the interest to stop insane slides into the destructive fury of revolution.
181. A state is an organization with a comparative advantage in violence, extending over a geographic area whose boundaries are determined by its power to tax constituents.
182. It is unfortunate when movements advocating equality of opportunity turn into movements focused on enforcing results. Theory poorly explains differences in group outcomes: groups are not abstractions. They come with histories and cultures, neither of which are postmodern or arbitary but instead deep and long-lasting. And genes for mental traits are not distributed perfectly evenly among groups.
183. In an unequal society of human capital, the majority resents its diminished status. It harbors the expectation of employing elections to drastically overturn its condition. In turn, the minority fears the outcome that may follow from free elections and the assertion of majority rule. As a result, it resorts to authoritarian institutions to guarantee its social and economic advantage.
184. To speak of a moral culture is redundant. Culture is a received inheritance of moral precepts, reflected in the doings and not-doings of a social order. In an anti-culture, however, the doings are dominant, all the sources of restraint, especially shame and guilt, are cast aside as oppressions.
185. There is much to admire about those traditions of duty, plain speaking, courage, male companionship, reticence, decency, scorn for affectation and pretense, skepticism of government, dislike of intellectuals and religious enthusiasts, love of gossip, and dedication to tobacco and booze.
186. It is important to delight in the everyday life that has been granted us, and to have little patience with the psychological problems of free people, especially if they involve a 'search for identity' or some other form of self-seeking and self-involvement.
187. Stupidity and evil are the same if measured by the result.
188. While death destroys man, the thought of death saves him.
189. Mankind is inherently self-interested and not moldable into a form like the high-minded with their hands on levers of power. Mankind engages in a perpetual and restless desire for power and status. Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.
190. A world of harmony and universal satisfaction are mirages. Tradeoffs between competing wants are inevitable.
191. Benefits from evolved societal rules cannot be articulated because they are developed through trial and error over centuries. Traditions provide wisdom without reflection.
192. The nation-state should be built as a political expression of a particular people. Map lines should follow organic human developments and histories such as ethnicity and religion as much as possible so as to minimize opportunities for conflict.
193. Humans are marked by more intractable separations than they would like to believe. Differences are not superficial and easy to combine. This tourist, superficial, overly aesthetic vision is carried by a passion for resemblance. Beyond recognizing and respecting the humanity of each person, there is pressure to see the other as the same as ourselves, and if we cannot stop ourselves from perceiving what is different, we reproach ourselves for doing so as if it were a sin.
194. The city-state and the nation-state are the only two political forms that have been capable of realizing the intimate union of civilization and liberty. The sovereign state and representative government are the two great artifices that have allowed for accommodation of huge masses of human beings within an order of civilization and liberty.
195. Defeating a guerrilla uprising broadly supported by the local populace requires a level of frightfulness that does not bear close inspection.
196. The state is a blunt instrument to modify social behavior and political climate.
197. The basis of society is not the individual, but the family and the neighborhood, because that is where citizenship is first and best learned.
198. The tendency of citizens to abandon the wider society and to define their lives in terms of material well-being and in relation to a small group of friends and family is most likely to occur in places of significant heterogeneity.
199. Without first principles, it is impossible to judge competing ideas without appeals to strength.
200. Virtue is not an exclusive commodity, and it should be defined outside of normal human experience. It is accessible but difficult. It signifies a habit attached to a faculty of the soul, disposing it to elicit with readiness acts conformable to our rational nature. Virtue is a good habit consonant with our nature.
201. Prejudices are visions about the way things are. They are divinations of the order of the whole of things, and hence the road to a knowledge of that whole. The mind that has no prejudices at the outset is empty.
202. Mostly-inbred human groups develop group characteristics — of behavior, and attitude, and socializability, as well as of mere appearance.
203. The greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another less than they do in the most homogenous settings. Nearly all measures of civic health are lower.
204. The emotional and imaginative resources people invest in places are important components of individual and social self-identity and a source of loyalty and affection. These places are usually physical places.
205. The deformation of modern philosophy was caused by the rise of rationalism in extremis. Man is more than weights and measures; he is a creature rooted in Aristotelian common sense, who seeks the divine ground of being.
206. The rationalists destruction of the concept of the moral imagination resulted in man being disconnected from reason, order, peace, virtue, and fruitful penitence, and into the antagonist worlds of madness, discord, vice, confusion and unavailing sorrow.
207. The moral imagination triggers the act of pneumatic differentiation where man recognizes the distinction between the radically transcendent God and the created realm or world. It allows the growth and development of consciousness, initiates the theophanic event that enables man to enter the metaxy where he exists in his fullness in his questing for the nature of his existential being within the truth of reality. It is the key ingredient in man’s relentless search for truth, without which man may gain knowledge, but not wisdom, peace, or salvation.
208. There is the mystery of free will, of individual choice, of divine Providence, and of the creation and sustaining of tradition. These mysteries have been addressed throughout human history, not through science or discussion, but through myth and story.
209. When human relationships are debased and brutalized into an animal relationship for public spectacle, the entire culture is infected, debased, and brutalized.
210. The task of morality is to suppress selfishness. Loyalty, respect for authority, and sanctity are moral concepts. The innate moral intuition are: preventing harm, reciprocity, loyalty to the in-group, respect for authority, and a sense of sanctity.
211. Moral cultures are cultivated based on the three binding foundations: ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity, as well as on the universally employed foundations of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity. The ideal is not a world of maximum freedom; it is a world of order and tradition in which people are united by a shared moral code that is effectively enforced, which enables people to trust each other to play their interdependent roles. It is a world of high social capital.
212. Small is the part of all the human heart endures can laws or kings cause or cure.
213. The good political order must be based upon human virtues. A de-emphasis of virtue is destructive to this. It believes that sufficient virtue are not attainable and therefore the good political order must be based on men as they are, that is upon their mediocrity and vices. This is not just realism or mere cynicism. It amounts to a deliberate choice as to how society should be organized, a decided de-emphasis on personal virtue. It leads to the new discipline of social science, which is concerned with coldly describing men as they actually are. But this is empty because only men with civic virtue will obey a constitution. This view leads naturally to value-free social science and social policies that seek to solve social problems through technocratic manipulation that refrain from "imposing value judgments" on the objects of its concern.
214. If man exists in opposition to nature, conquering it to serve his comfort, then nature does not define what is good for man. Man does. This view is the basis for the modern penchant to make freedom and comfort (that is, prosperity) the central concerns of political philosophy, whereas the ancients made virtue the center. Once man is outside nature, he has no natural teleology or purpose, and therefore no natural virtues. Since he has no natural purpose, anything that might give him one, like God, is suspect, and thus modernity tends towards atheism. Similarly, man’s duties, as opposed to his rights, drop away, as does his natural sociability. The philosophical price of freedom is purposelessness, which ultimately gives rise to the alienation, anomie, and nihilism of modern life.
215. Politics implies natural goods that are prior to human thinking about them. If man is political by nature, the goods of politics also exist by nature. The goods of politics are the ways man must behave to make political community work. If there are natural goods, there is a natural hierarchy of goods, and therefore a natural hierarchy of men, as different men pursue different goods. Civic equality may be salutary for the functioning of society, but men are not truly equal in value.
216. Reason and revelation cannot refute each other. Religion is the great necessity for ordinary men because it is in essence revealed law.
217. The instincts which give rise to the mysterious process of nature, by the dark and inscrutable ways in which we come into the world, are not of our making. But out of physical causes, unknown to us, perhaps unknowable, arise moral duties, which, as we are able perfectly to comprehend, we are bound indispensably to perform. Parents may not be consenting to their moral relation; but consenting or not, they are bound to a long train of burthensome duties towards those with whom they have never made a convention of any sort. Children are not consenting to their relation, but their relation, without their actual consent, binds them to its duties; or rather it implies their consent because the presumed consent of every rational creature is in unison with the predisposed order of things.
218. Intelligence - the different statistical profiles of different peoples on measures of cognitive function — is an important factor in history and the development of human groups. The workings of biology cannot suspended so as to maintain unpopular opinions that are indicators of low status in elite culture, and speculation based on sound science is descriptive and useful.
219. The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the esteem of our peers.
220. Morality is not grounded in an ethic of wants and sentiment. It is grounded in reason, which is the arbitor of proper action. Humans are not always at liberty to pursue their wants, but they must always respect the dignity of the human person. There is a real self beyond the collections of perceptions and passions.
221. Most history is written by the dissenters.
222. The common good must begin with families, in neighborhoods and in communities. It begins with an organic cultural and religious transformation from the ground up.
223. One of the asymmetries of history is the lack of correspondence between the abilities of some leaders and the power of their countries.
224. Place no faith in time.
225. The proper development of order, convention, religion, respectability, and solidity begins with family life, as the illusion that we are entirely self-sufficient creatures whose destiny is in our hands shatters.
226. A society must progress by building on what has successfully provided it with peace, virtue, and freedom in the past, and so by building on the best fruits of its own traditions; to do this a society needs to preserve and sustain the sources of its strength. It is necessary to defend and uphold a society’s particular explicit and implicit creeds - prejudices - a word robbed of its full and complex meaning. These deeply held and widely shared premises are what holds a society together and what sustains unity, peace, and sensible reform in the otherwise raucous atmosphere of an increasingly democratic politics.
227. People mostly care about themselves. People are motivated by selfish altruism. People don't think much. Conformity is the norm. People are insecure, and worry that others will discover and reveal their flaws. People are pretty much only focused on themselves, so while Person A is worried that Person B will discover and reveal his flaws, Person B is worrying the same thing about Person A. In the end, people see in the world what they expect to see in it.
228. There are four braided but distinct strands of modern American conservatism. Traditionalists value continuity, order and hierarchy; libertarians prize personal freedom and social spontaneity; neoconservatives blend the New Deal’s idealistic spirit with conservatism’s muscular nationalism; and religious conservatives fight relativism, secularism and immorality.
229. Education is that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.
230. Defense of the realm, a stable moral order, and unintrusive government should be the highest aims of a nation-state.
231. Humility, Kindness, Forgiveness, Diligence, Charity, Temperance, and Chastity should be the highest aims of a person.
232. Human nature tends toward sin and we should adopt customs that steer us away from those tendencies.
233. Since the invention of photography, all art has been more or less consciously fraudulent.
234. Morality arises from sympathy among like-minded persons: first the family, then friends and colleagues. Rights grow from convictions about how we ought to manage relations with people not like us, convictions that are nourished by education, religion, and experience.
235. There's a limit to what you can say in a multicultural society, especially with regard to inherited difference in intelligence, as measured by abstract reasoning ability, among groups.
236. There are many nation-states impervious to the logic of reason but highly sensitive to the logic of force.
237. The law of unintended consequences is a harsh mistress.
238. Local devotions are likely to be overcome by the power of unleashed human ambition.
239. Multiculturalism has led not to integration but to segregation, endangering liberal democracy which is poisoned by the rise of identity politics as aggrieved groups jockey for special treatment. The effect is inexorably divisive, a culture of victimhood that sets group against group, each claiming that its pain, injury, oppression, humiliation is greater than that of others.
240. Clichés are annoying for the tediousness of their truth, not their untruth.
241. We may not be interested in the reality of human nature, but it is interested in us.
242. The truth is great and shall prevail when none cares whether it prevail or not.
243. A community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.
244. Always lurking are cults of murderous violence that exalt death and destruction and despise the life of the mind.
245. Civilized decline can be so charming one does not notice it is about to accelerate into uncivilized decline.
246. No well-adjusted person should be, or should be required to be, interested in politics very much.
247. It is almost always relevant to ask the classical question, who stands to gain?
248. It is a moralistic fallacy to think that phenomena that ought not exist should therefore be spoken and written about as if they do not exist.
249. Politicians look to the next election; statesmen may look to the next generation; but monarchs must look to the next generation. There is significant reassurance and security of a certain amount of continuity at the top in a highly mobile and volatile society. People are comforted by a familiar name and face.
250. There is a deep emotional satisfaction in the pride of a father whose child wants to emulate him.
251. When the exceptions become the rule, it is possible to indignantly dismiss biological conjectures so as to deny that there is a basic human nature. This facilitates intellectuals being funded so as to carry out improbable social engineering projects.
252. Citizens lose trust in political leaders not because they are imperfect but because they are not honest.
253. When confronted with uncomfortable truths, most people will resort to the “cultural conditioning” argument. Fear of the unchangeable is common.
254. Much of life is best understood through the prism of status wars.
255. Success comes to those whose desire is stronger than their fear.
256. Proximity and diversity is a dangerous combination.
257. Politics and history are a moral contest between good and evil, not of individuals who are products of historical forces greater than themselves.
258. Liberty should not be an end in itself; it is instead a means, a natural endowment, by which to achieve the common good. Individuals must use their liberty well. Authority, by creating a just order, encourages liberty over license.
259. A person will flourish by concentrating on the aspects of life that can be controlled rather than by reacting to external forces.
260. Every society and civilization is an attempt to create order, an orientation of men's lives toward nature, society, and the divine.
261. The most subtle test of character is set in the absence of adversity.
262. There is far too much corruption, racketeering, and nepotism among humans to have faith in placing large amounts of money and property in the hands of "the people."
263. Life is short, and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth.
264. Pluralism, sound culture, and freedom define the true meaning of the word liberal.
265. If one has the intelligence to see which rules are real and which are fake, the respectfulness to follow the real rules, and the courage to break the fake rules, one can get ahead in this world. In fact, people will love the breaking of the fake rules.
266. Outsider powers can play an important facilitating role bringing together partners, but only if they have independently determined that they prefer peace to a continuation of war.
267. Diversity and freedom of speech are always in tension; as diversity grows, so, inevitably, will the demand for censorship.
268. An individual will make worse decisions in individual cases on average if excluded from consideration is prior learning about the general category.
269. Plato's disease is the assumption that reality fundamentally consists of abstract essences best described by words or geometry. In truth, reality is largely a probabilistic affair best described by statistics.
270. Ambition can create a little madness.
271. Culture must be at ease with the inheritance of the past. It must be able to refer to things beyond itself.
272. To view all forms of violence as equally evil is to think that as long as one persists the others may still be undertaken.
273. The question of if genetic differences exist and why falls into the domain of science - of genetics, psychometrics, and anthropology. A priori, there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.
274. Instead of scooping for symbols, seeking poetry, and being at least receptive to majestic truths, many prefer to rewind their petty postmodern formula for one more deconstruction. And if hegemony and racism and social constructs are what is sought, that all belief in the power of art has been destroyed.
275. There should be little patience with "ologies" and "isms" that claim life can be reduced to a single guiding force or principle - economics, race, the mind, brute force, sexuality, material chance.
276. Reality consists of two distinct, absolute, and all-inclusive elements, something like matter and mind or nature and spirit, which exists together in a complex perpetual relationship in the universe and the existential world of mankind.
277. To be born into a minority is, in part, to be born into a collective experience of insecurity. Group identity can be the enemy of individuality; the group is naturally threatened by the impulses in some of its members to step outside of the collective experience, as an indulgence in individuality can be seen as a collaboration.
278. Any chain of cause and effect must ultimately begin with an uncaused cause. No matter how far science advances, an explanation of ultimate origins must always, by the very definition of the scientific method, remain a non-scientific question. It is possible to defer to scientific explanations for physical processes while still remaining within the central Judeo-Christian tradition: God provides answers for ultimate cause and purpose.
279. There are advantages to small community: in the small state, the city, or the village, the man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is that in a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us.
280. The American founding documents intended to include all men, but they did not intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men created equal—equal in certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
281. In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.
282. Liberty, freedom, and virtue should never be an ideology.
283. Something is not wrong because it is illegal; it is illegal because it is wrong. Once this distinction is lost, civil society becomes all but impossible because a broadly agreed morality is a basis of social cohesion.
284. When there’s no longer a sufficiently strong moral consensus and when the state actively disapproves of a self-reliant citizenry, what remains is the law. And law detached from any other social pillars is not enough to sustain a civil society.
285. Models and thought experiments are designed to illumiate principles. Simplification is necessary to see the world more clearly.
286. Perfectly in accord with settled principles of biology and genetics are the following: there are group-statistical differences between races and genders, these differences have developed via the pressures of natural selection working on the peculiarities of small founder populations, and they likely include group-statistical differences in personality, cognitive function, and behavior.
287. History cannot be a science; it is the very opposite, in that its interest resides in the particulars.
288. An age (a shorter span within an era) is unified by one or to pressing needs, not by the proposed remedies, which are many and thus divide.
289. A movement in thought or art produces its best work during the uphill fight to oust the enemy, the previous thought or art. Victory brings on imitation and ultimately boredom.
290. The historian does not isolate causes, which defy sorting out even in the natural world; he describes conditions that he judges relevant, adding occasionally an estimate of their relevant strength.
291. The potent writings that helped to reshape minds and institutions in the West have done so through a formula or two, not always consistent with the text. Partisans and scholars start to read the book with care after it has done its work.
292. History, fundamentally, is made by individuals. All forms of determinism are grievously mistaken and destructive.
293. Human liberty is an absolute datum of consciousness and reality. The supreme pleasure and prerogative of the human person is to feel at once a moral being and a natural philosopher.
294. There are two dominant modern intellectual extremes and errors: scientific reductionism and histrionic subjectivism. Both are a state of childishness, where humans are permissive not from a love of liberty but because of a lack of self-control and fear of restraint. Innocence is praised because of the want for a license to behave like an infant. These extremes congeal into intellectual attitudes and institutional forms in the culture: the scientistic worship of material procedures and objects, and the anarchic exaltation of aesthetic eccentricity and self-expression, a world of incessant autobiography.
295. Any work of the philosophy of history that denies human agency and novelty does not understand that history is the graveyard of trends and the birthplace of counter-trends. There is no monocausality and no determinism in history.
296. Life which spurs desire and fills the mind is wider than science or art or philosophy or all together.
297. Responsibility, the foundation of the penal code, eludes scientific analysis. Learned foolishness is a dangerous folly, especially when clothed with the notion that purpose is an illusion.
298. Humans must respect themselves; morality and the civic social life are impossible without it. Yet self-respect must not engender vanity and self-righteousness.
299. Hope is itself a species of happiness, the chief happiness which this world affords. It is necessary in every condition.
300. In order to be taught to speak and seek truth, it is necessary to learn to hear it.
301. Tolerance, generosity, and reasoned skepticism are hallmarks of the truly liberal spirit.
302. Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst.
303. The left believes in evolution but not biology; the right believes in biology but not evolution.
304. History does not consist of the struggle to determine the proper ideology. It is never "finished" after the end of all plausible alternatives. History is not about ideology, but "Who? Whom?" It continues because the struggle to determine who will be the who rather than the whom will never end.
305. A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. The art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one party of the citizens to give to the other. The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of misery. And government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
306. Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
307. The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.
308. Truly great madness cannot be achieved without significant intelligence.
309. Flaws in character produce flaws in behavior that must be accounted for.
310. Humans judge others by their actions and themselves by intentions.
311. Liberty contains the seeds of its own destruction. Liberty inevitably gives way to license, yet time after time, liberty, while not without its drawbacks, is the most reliable path to human excellence, prosperity, and progress. It is the natural condition in which human beings flourish.
312. It is in the nature of civilization that it must be in constant conflict with barbarism.
313. Surprise is a powerful antidote to cynicism.
314. All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
315. To go through life is not to walk across a field.
316. Often, change is made to create the illusion of progress.
317. Fear cuts deeper than swords, but inspiration cuts deeper still.
318. Human equality is a contingent fact of history. Equality is not given a priori; it is neither an ethical principle (though equal treatment may be) nor a statement about norms of social action.
319. The word 'social' in a sentence negates the meaning of the word following it.
320. Humans are creatures with souls and are not reducible to either bodies or minds. The tendency to identify primarily with bodies leads to an increasingly paranoid, puritanical, and prohibitionist attitude toward health and safety, while the tendency to understand as minds apart from bodies allows humans to treat bodies, and even moods, as property to be sold and manipulated technologically.
321. Architecture is perennially important because, unlike poems and songs, most acts of architecture are substantial public acts. What damage is done if a poet writes yet another bad modernist poem? Yet bad buildings and developments do not just come and go. They can degrade shared environments and damage the lives of thousands of people in practical and immediate ways. They will also be around for long periods of time. It is style and not sincerity that counts. Those who must use the building know the impact of the facade. There is a large difference between a sheet of glass and an arch that guides. One welcomes and one creates anxiety. The modernist is a repellant, rationalist, and Kafka-esque hell, populated by anxious people whose minds are elsewhere and who'd rather be anyplace else. It has all the personality and lovableness of a bureaucracy. The opposite orient themselves by reference to cultural history and norms and to basic human scale. Yet the details, textures, and motifs vary wildly. The structures relate to human scale as a physical being, and coexist easily with nature. It is better to produce structure that's devoted to beauty, class, and pleasure. There's subtlety, texture, depth.
322. Large social phenomena have an urban manifestation - subtle, cerebral, intellectual, tending towards decadence - and a rustic one - plain, active, instinctual, tending towards fanaticism. The two factions ought to strive to get along in pursuit of their common goal and hope that their negative tendencies will cancel each other out.
323. The despair of intellectuals is the hope of the nation.
324. Defending the virtue of traditional cultures should never give rise to a high-minded rationalization for a persisting status quo of medievalism and intellectual poverty.
325. Words and sounds - the rhythmic patterns in which they are bound together in music and poetry - have a unique power to awaken the mind. Rhythm has the power to prepare the soul to receive truths that would otherwise remain unintelligible.
326. Politics does not help to find meaning; it is not primarily about catering to one’s feelings and passions. It is the deployment of self-interest in the public arena.
327. As sympathies vary from person to person, some may respond more or less to these feelings, but the use of craftsmanship does not vary. It enables, but is not an end in itself. Art, at its best, give form to feeling, but it does not exist independently of it.
328. Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence.
329. Fascism is the cult of state organized unity, and it was a movement of centralized planning, group identification, and willing obedience to a charismatic leader. This movement is collectivist and authoritarian - large, intrusive, and modernist, a rallying point to or a substitute for commonality, an organism that should nearly always respond when people “hurt.” Fascism should be understood as a supercharged nationalistic statism, finding its theoretical wellsprings in Hegelian historicism, Rousseau's protean "general will," Nietzschean will-to-power, Darwinian evolution, and a smattering of the Social Gospel thrown in for good measure—all of which overturned the older liberalism of Locke, the Enlightenment, and the American Founders. It is committed to an ever-expanding state, without any limits in principle. Fascism is a collectivist doctrine, worshipful towards the centralized state, socialist in economics, hostile to both tradition and capitalism — in short, a left-wing ideology opposed in almost every respect to classical liberal conservative individualism. Fascism was a religion, and the animating dogma of the faith was that all citizens must be together. It is belief in the primacy of the state as a historical actor: everything in the state, nothing outside the state. All the statist and collectivism -isms were reactionary in that they sought to repackage tribal values under the guise of modern concepts. Hitlerism was socialism for one race. Bolshevism was socialism for one class. Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the ‘problem’ and therefore defined as the enemy. Fascism has a grave moral defect: it fails to recognize the individual as the key social unit. Right economic reasoning begins not with the nation but with human action, and right social policy begins with the recognition that society is made up of individuals with souls. Fascism, on the other hand, by ignoring the individual soul, is socialism's close cousin because it exults in the idolatry of the state. Contemporary progressivism is a political religion with its roots in German state theory, sharing a close family resemblance to fascism. Among the anatomical and genetic similarities: cult of unity, sacralization of politics, philosophical pragmatism, corporatism, relativism, Romanticism, hero-worship, collectivism. Here, corporations are a "partner" with governments, NGOs, the U.N., and other massive multinationals. The profit motive is "good" for efficiency and rewarding talent, but beyond that, there is a desire for order and predictability and planning. This mindset informs the entire class of transnational progressives, the shock troops of what H. G. Wells hoped would lead to his liberal-fascist "world brain." They want big corporations and big government working in tandem with labor, universities, and progressive organizations to come up with "inclusive" policies set at the national or international level. That’s not necessarily socialism — it’s corporatism. This is the economic philosophy of fascism. Government is the senior partner, but all of the other institutions are on board, so long as they agree with the government’s agenda. The people left out of this coordinated effort — the Nazis called it the Gleichschaltung — are the small businessmen, the entrepreneurs, the ideological, social, or economic mavericks who don’t want to play along.
330. Strong families and common, shared, confident culture is the backbone of strong community. Government should perform its limited and necessary duties well, as an instrument to support families and the organic development of communities.
331. Morality, not attempts to “change a system,” should be at the foundation of what must change in a time of public sickness.
332. Government can never be transformational; it can never love you; it can never serve as a substitute for parenthood; it is not a living organism. It is a blunt instrument that might or might not have a degree of competence.
333. Underneath the veneer of civilized discourse humans act in ways that are brazenly self-interested in the short term. Seeking short term status is a matter of self-interest.
334. The physical body is not irrelevant to a human community. The emotional subtext of human communication is crucial to human thought. It isn't a footnote. There is no thought without emotion, and there is no real communication without emotion‹subtle emotions that allow humans to recognize another human being and understand the nuances of what is being communicated.
335. Minority-rights doctrine has produced a moral inversion, in which those doing wrong are excused if they belong to a 'victim' group, while those at the receiving end of their behaviour are blamed simply because they belong to the 'oppressive' majority.
336. Multiculturalism often means a society in which, in the interests of protecting the "collective rights" of various identity groups, individual rights are circumscribed and public discourse is ever more regulated by the state.
337. In a non-homogeneous nation-state, free markets and democracy will bring ethnic conflict.
338. No one is immune to the appeal of identity politics.
339. Community does not simply denote an aggregate of individuals, but a unity of persons in a common culture.
340. Members of a common society hold some moral obligations in common.
341. Liberal democracy is a radical imposition on the natural human desire to live clannishly.
342. The debasement of language goes hand in hand with the debasement of thought.
343. There is a large set of traditional values that have proven worth maintaining and over which we are perpetually obliged to deliberate in order to make the tough and sometimes tragic decisions about how to maximize the fulfillment of as many of them as possible; the state should be very small, so that the determinations of this deliberation – and not a general will or utopian disdain for the perpetual task of deliberation over the set values - can hold sway.
344. One should not accept a firm distinction between national interests and universal ideals.
345. One’s ethnicity should not replaces one’s humanity or individual character as the primary quality in virtue of which one deserves respect.
346. Humans would rather remember than think.
347. Statism and the politicization of life are common temptations that should be resisted regardless of environment. A lost faith in limited government, free market ideas, political democracy, diverse and competing social and cultural institutions, and the messiness of a free society is to gain faith in utopian scheming. Soon there will be a semi-religious awe for the centralized state as the expression of united national community.
348. There exists within statism a fear of free will which in the end results in disallowing chance for virtue.
349. The more closely related the alleged conspirators are, the more likely that there is an actual conspiracy.
350. Anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him.
351. The very foundation of humanity is freedom, not a mere absence of external restraint or a resolve to act “authentically,” but the capacity to choose between good and evil.
352. Genuine art serves freedom, not by instructing humans how to act but by helping to resist the forces that threaten to strip humans of moral agency altogether.
353. Nothing can cast aside blood and kin and faith.
354. Conservatism is opposition to all forms of political religion. It is a rejection of the idea that politics can be redemptive. It is the conviction that a properly ordered republic has a government of limited ambition. Liberal institutions in Europe are largely conservative ones in America: private property, free markets, individual liberty, freedom of conscience, and the rights of communities to determine for themselves how they will live within these guidelines. Progress comes from working out inconsistencies within this tradition, not by throwing it away. Conservatism has to do with social order; it recognizes that the sufferings of the underdog are not caused by the fact that some have managed to rescue themselves from their predicament. It is anti-utopian and against the view that what is human should be measured in terms of wealth or power. Conservatism originates in an attitude to civil society, and it is from a conception of civil society that its political doctrine is derived.
355. Enlightenment theorists promised liberation from various types of external authority: familial, religious, and political. But an unintended consequence of the implementation of Enlightenment theories is the elimination of freedom.
356. Civilization, at any given moment, can be boiled down to what its living members know and believe. This makes civilization fragile and it makes parents the primary guardians of its posterity.
357. Virtue, freely chosen, must be the aim of humanity.
358. When private charity is cast aside for instututionalized compassion, there emerges a source of enormous corruption.
359. Good intentions imposed in their normal belligerent and self-righteous way are deeply offensive.
360. The mere fact that someone desires something is not enough to grant a right to pursue it provided there is no interference with the rights of others. Human desires are fundamentally in need of emendation.
361. Intimacy as an affair of organs, discussed in measurable terms and in terms of sensation, is unjustly emancipated from the great project of human love. This is a form of liberation, but to liberate people from love is undesirable. It is a liberation into emptiness. It degrades not only the person but also child-rearing and responsibility and all of the difficult sacrifices which are necessary if one generation is to inherit the social capital of the previous one. Likewise homosexuality: to know inwardly a gender is to recognize the intimations and desires; there is no venture outwards into the unknown. It becomes in the end a matter of dehumanizing contractual negotiations.
362. Self-expression is proper if there is something interesting to express. And what makes a self interesting is a rigorous process of discipline and order and self-understanding.
363. Radicalism is a matter of temperament. Radicals are those who are arrested in the state of adolescent rebellion. They have grown away from experience and social capital. The temperament is an attempt to repudiate this so as to shape identity. Yet true maturity consists of the process of coming home again and seeing those things grown away from as true. Radical temperament is arrestment in the middle stage. The exploitation of the adolescent, where it looks not only normal but sacrosanct, is tragic.
364. Lustful fantasy depersonalizes the human being and improvishes the ability to confront human beings as they are. It is a flight from reality where one "controls." This is different from imagination, an imaginative re-creation which enables one to confront real people.
365. Every possible form of restraint and parental control should be encouraged, as there is much that threatens the ability of society to reproduce itself in an ordinary way.
366. Crowds are terrifying because they have a will of their own and act independently of rationality.
367. At the root of social order should be loyalty, allegiance, community, and tradition. Such a vision of society is one in which autonomous institutions and private initiatives predominate, and in which the law protects the shared values that bind the community together. Such a vision is only tenuously related to the market economy, to monetarism, to free enterprise, or to capitalism. It involves neither hostility toward the state, nor the desire to limit the state's obligation to the citizen. Its conceptions of society, law, and citizenship regard the individual not as the premise but as the conclusion of politics. Such a vision is opposed to the ethic of social justice, to equality of station, opportunity, income, and achievement, and to the attempt to bring major institutions of society under government control.
368. Hope can be a terrible liar.
369. There are two fundamental biological drives: the drive for self-preservation and the drive to spread genes through reproduction.
370. Self-deception keeps humans sane. Even when they do have enough clarity to realize the truth about themselves, if put on the spot, especially in front of strangers who will be judging them, they will still probably lie to save face. Judge people by the results of their actions and maneuvers, not their words. People will say almost anything to justify their actions, to give them a moral or sanctimonious veneer. The only thing that is clear, the only way to judge effectively, is by looking at actions and the results of actions. That is the effective truth.
371. A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.
372. Rationalism, with its universalistic “rights of man,” has an enthusiasm of its own that springs from an abstracting lack of concern for the densely complicated facts of any existing political landscape. And so the rationalists unleash unintended consequences that in turn unleash murderous passions and despotism.
373. The most dangerous human folly springs from convenient reason combined with an exaggerated love of justice.
374. There is a cultural metabolism that underlies the dialectic of modernism and its aftermath: much — if not quite everything — that we continue to esteem in the creative achievements of the last two centuries owes its existence to a curious compact between the bourgeoisie and its licensed opposition. But the dynamism of the avant-garde, with its unremitting appetite for innovation and its steady erosion of established values — including the values established by its own efforts — came in time to exert a powerful control over the very culture it still ostensibly “opposed.” So completely did the bourgeois society cede its cultural initiatives to this licensed opposition that the terms of their compact came to be fatefully altered. It was now the avant-garde that dominated cultural life — thus, in effect, ceasing to function as an authentic avant-garde — and the surviving remnants of bourgeois “reaction” that went through the motions of a principled resistance.
375. Romantic excess comes to a dead end with complete self-indulgence and the therapeutic effacement of the ideas of sin and redemption.
376. Those who get something for nothing will earn every penny of it, twice over.
377. Any calling which claims to be a whole philosophy of life is not one at all. It is a religion, and a false one.
378. Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.
379. There are no sweeping state solutions to a permanent problem of the human condition. There is no first step to such a solution.
380. Beneficial reform can only be gradual, and even when beneficial it must come with trade-offs. There is no cure for the ailments of the human condition. Human knowledge is gradual, cumulative and, perhaps most of all, fragile. The sophisters and calculators who seek to erase tradition in a riot of will and rationalism invite nothing but thunder and doom.
381. Every person has meaning apart from the society in which individuality has been formed.
382. A preoccupation with the future not only prevents from seeing the present as it is but often prompts rearrangement of the past.
383. Ignorance of human society runs deep. The experimentation of an open society is needed not only because different people often want different things, but even more importantly because humans are rarely sure of what works.
384. The most intelligent and most well-intentioned collective action eventually fails because of human weakness and selfishness.
385. Life happens at the level of events, not of words.
386. Moral failures become institutional and societal failures.
387. The more the state gets out of the business of policing the sin, the more the rest of the society needs to get into the business of condemning it.
388. The past shows unvaryingly that when a people’s freedom disappears, it goes not with a bang, but in silence amid the comfort of being cared for. That is the dire peril in the present trend toward statism. If freedom is not found accompanied by a willingness to resist, and to reject favors, rather than to give up what is intangible but precarious, it will not long be found at all.
389. No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.
390. No one is immune to vice or a vessel for virtue — all are at risk of doing things that violate principles.
391. Patriotism is a species of unity that has some redeeming moral and philosophical substance. Patriotism — as opposed to nationalism — is a love for a creed, a dedication to what is best. Nationalism, a romantic sensibility, says, “My country is always right.” Patriots hope that their nation will make the right choice.
392. People at the top need a relaxed perspective, which gives judgment and balance. Workaholism is an introspection-killing disease, the anxious disability of tunnel-vision middle managers.
393. The more variety, the more power needed to smooth differences in variety out. This is against particularity, against the local, and that necessarily will work against freedom.
394. He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one.
395. All of the totalitarian "isms" are reactionary in the sense they are attempting to restore the ancient and instinctive yearning to live in a sacralized tribe. Socialism arises out of the burning issue of "the social question." The social question was aimed at how all of society was to be properly organized so as to give the deracinated urban masses a sense of belonging and meaning. The Fascists wanted socialism in one state. The Nazis wanted socialism for one race (an obvious form of tribalism). And the Communists desired socialism for one class. All of these ideologies sought a "new" politics of meaning, but what their adherents really desired was to restore what they thought they'd lost.
396. Individualism in the extreme leads to totalitarianism. Absent a cultural, religious or moral reason for action, it falls to the state to take the place of inherited tradition in the hyper-individualistic state.
397. What distinguishes civilized man from a barbarian must be acquired by every individual anew.
398. With power comes money, and money corrupts. States are giant extraction devices. They enable one to consume the products of human effort without producing anything oneself, and without winning the voluntary consent of the producers. State power is one of the most highly addictive substances known.
399. Tradition has a purpose. It's not just myth and habit. Tradition is the collective experience of humans.
400. Justice and liberty must stand or fall together. Liberty, a definite liberty, exists under law, the limits of which are determined by prescription. These liberties are not innovations, discovered in an Age of Reason, but ancient prerogatives guaranteed by immemorial usage.
401. In the revolutions of secular political religions there is a radical repudiation of all existing institutions and arrangements, absolute confidence in competence to build a new and far better society, willingness to kill contemporaries in great numbers, for the supposed benefit of posterity, contemptuous hostility to all religion, and a program for its enforced elimination from the world.
402. A statesman’s chief virtue is prudence.
403. The central revelation of Western experience is that man cannot ineradicably stain himself, for the wells of regeneration are infinitely deep. Even out of the depths of despair, humans take heart in the knowledge that it cannot matter how deep they fall, for there is always hope.
404. The intellectual probity of a person is measured not merely by what comes out of him, but by what he puts up with in others.
405. The spirit knows that its growth is the real aim of existence.
406. It is both man’s tragedy and his glory that some of his questions are unanswerable.
407. Conservatism at its highest is for the regeneration of spirit and character - with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded.
408. The scientific and other forces that have compelled society to think constantly in terms of the mass cause humans to accept the idea of ever more complete planning. But planning tends only too easily to totalitarianism; and the reason is that the secular state always concerns itself with riches or power - which are means, and not with the destiny of the soul, which is the end. The forces that appear to make human civilization so irresistible - wealth, organization, military power - are essentially hollow, and crumble to dust as soon as the human purpose that animates them loses its strength.
409. All culture arises from cult, from the religious belief systems adopted by communities in specific times and locales. All history is not simply a series of accounts of human conflict as told by winners, but is instead the working out of mysterious design on earth only fitfully discerned as such. The divine madness, a mind beside itself, allows one to order the soul properly. Imagination enables humans to begin to enter into the mind and experiences of others, upon which the Golden Rule - Do unto others as you would have them do unto you - is predicated. The effect of imagination is to deepen understanding of the larger world.
410. Since all things are the same, except for the differences, and different except for the similarities, it is always possible to make things look similar verbally, however different they are in the real world.
411. The world is not awash in a field of love consciousness. It is instead awash in fear, hatred, anger, jealousy, duplicity, lust, ego...and occasionally love. There is a reason so many people yearn for its life-giving power of requited love - because it is so rare.
412. It is not true that man cannot organize the world without God. But without God, he can only organize it against man.
413. The natural moral law — the moral truths we can know by reason — is a kind of global grammar by which the world can rationally discuss its future.
414. A nation is an enthocultural entity many years in the making. It is not an ideological proposition. It is not infinitely plastic. Change cannot be introduced without consequences.
415. Humans desperately want to recreate the feeling of the of spiritually resonant tribe. There is an inborn quest for community. This desire can be productive and vital if acted upon in a healthy manner. But it can also be twisted, distorted and corrupted when left unconstrained by law, philosophy and dogma. Tribalism is too central to the human condition to be transcended.
416. The more that social order is threatened by the unwillingness of indviduals to comply with its instructions, the more coercive it will become.
417. All is not philanthropic that speaks of utopia.
418. The most dangerous constants of our human condition – selfishness, status-seeking, the thoughtless imposition of will – have no solution. The state does not give meaning or dignity; every person possesses these inherently wholly apart from that place where individuality and family identity are formed. Unity organized by the state is false in any moment when concepts of “justice,” “rationalism,” and “rights” are taken to the uniformity of existence. There should be an order of voluntary associations serving as a barrier between the state and the individual, family, and community. The state is the arbiter and never a servant to a particular class or metaphysical interest. Our spiritual unity should always be grounded in the shared humanity cleansed by our creator and redeemer. The society possessing spiritual-like goals to be overseen by the state is the society that takes idealism into the realm of prohibitive and unforeseen danger.
419. Beauty is the index to civilization.
420. In organization, resist ideology, reflexive partisanship, wishful thinking, and emotion.
421. One cannot begin to philosophize without knowing why certain self-evident truths are the basis of justice and of sanity. There is no ground for human rights in positive law unless there is a prior ground in natural law recognizing that human beings are neither beasts nor God.
422. The human brain is wired to prefer tribal organization. All of the big "isms" of the 20th century – communism, fascism, socialism, environmentalism, and progressivism – are predicated on a truly reactionary vision that tries to recreate tribal living on "modern" lines. Communism is a tribalism of class, fascism is tribalism of nation, Nazism is tribalism of race, Jihadism is a tribalism of religion. Egalitarianism itself is a form of tribalism. It comes from the instinctive jealousy which says "no one should have more than his share." There has been only one truly revolutionary political idea: liberalism of the classical variety. It sought to break the logic of tribalism. Freedom is what we have in a state of nature. This naturally terrifies us and is why we prefer to live in the tribal arrangements we evolved in. Yet liberty is a human invention requiring civic education and commitment to certain enduring principles. It takes work precisely because it does not come naturally.
423. There are those Muslims who want the power that free inquiry confers, without either the free inquiry or the philosophy and institutions that guarantee that free inquiry. They are faced with a dilemma: either they can abandon cherished religion, or they can remain forever in the rear of human technical advance. Neither alternative is very appealing; and the tension between their desire for power and success in the modern world on the one hand, and their desire not to abandon their religion on the other, is resolvable for some only by exploding themselves as bombs. It's very difficult to understand the machinery of hatred, because you wind up resorting to logic, but trying to understand this with logic is like measuring distance in kilograms. Many in Islamic nations are envious. To them, life is an unbearable burden. Modernism is the only way out but that is frightening. It means they have to compete. It means they can't explain everything away with conspiracy theories. Talent and the free inquiry necessary to cultivate it support jealousy among the constrained. As Muslims believe they are in possession of the final revealed truth, and that they have a testament and a tradition of sayings of the prophet that in essence answer all human questions, by that light all questions ought not only to be answered but are answerable. While no doubt there are Christians and Jews who feel similar about their favored scriptures, Islam must now live in a world of competing ideas. Yet they have created societies in which it is possible, perhaps, to dispute what the Koran and Hadith mean, but not their underlying authority to answer all questions. It is still not safe in a Muslim country to say ‘There is no God and Mohammed was therefore not his prophet.’ In summary, we have: metaphysical superiority, technical and intellectual retardation, self-hatred caused by the impurity of their own desires, no practical means of escape from genuine quotidian humiliations, and the promise of rewards for their families on earth and for themselves in the outer world.
424. For much of the world, organized by tribe, people choose the strong horse over the weak horse, the goal is always to dominate your enemy and dominate the peace, and respect comes from strength and fortitude.
425. Individual ambitions and human weaknesses will never be tamed, no matter how noble the collectivist project to do so.
426. Modesty and chastity awaiting marriage are not just strategically sound and psychologically important. They are also an emblem of the unique friendship that is the union of husband and wife, in which the giving of the heart is enacted in the giving of the body, and in which the procreative fruit of their one-flesh bodily union celebrates their loving embrace not only of one another but also of their mortal condition and their capacity self-consciously to transcend it. There is no substitute for the contribution that the shared work of raising children makes to the singular friendship and love of husband and wife. Precisely because of its central procreative mission, and, even more, because children are yours for a lifetime, this is a friendship that cannot be had with any other person. Uniquely, it is a friendship that does not fly from but rather embraces wholeheartedly the finitude of its members, affirming without resentment the truth of our human condition. Not by accident does the same biblical Hebrew verb mean both to know intimately and to know the truth, including the generative truth about the meaning of being man and woman.
427. A gentleman is one who is merciful towards the absurd.
428. There is an all too common double game in academia - claims about the radical unintelligibility of “truth” to authoritative pronouncements on matters social and political.
429. In order to remain politically viable modern socialists no longer advocate direct government ownership of production. Instead, modern socialism operates on two different levels: at a personal level, it speaks to the alienation of the individual, stressing the need for caring and sharing and the politics of meaning. At a regulatory level, it seeks to identify specific sectors in which there is a market failure and then to subject them to various forms of government regulation.
430. There is no such thing as a policy solution. There is only policy trade-offs.
431. In a society which values personal freedom and autonomy, it is easy to lose sight of human dependence on others as well as the responsibilities born towards them. Humans were created as social beings who find fulfillment only in love, for God and for neighbor.
432. The downside of modern liberal democracy and capitalism is that it arouses in people the desire to live in a more "natural" un-modern way. That desire will never go away because human nature is eternal.
433. The human being is more than a thing, a means, an instrument, a non-moral, non-spirited material agent.
434. There are three basic human weaknesses: too little consciousness of the irony, tragedy, and irrepressible sinfulness of human affairs; an unrealistic appraisal of the proper role of power and self-interest in all human institutions; and a strong tendency toward rosy, gauzy hope in “progress,” including utopian fantasies about “new” types of human societies.
435. There should be an appreciation for the wisdom of ancestors and for modes of philosophical and moral thinking that complement what we know from science. Science makes a marvelous servant of humanity, but a very poor master.
436. The city of man is built on the power to put down insurrection and impose the peace.
437. Theory is gray, but green is the tree of life.
438. In the face of cultural and political currents that attempt to eliminate, or at least to obfuscate and confuse, the sexual differences written into human nature, considering them to be cultural constructions, it is necessary to recall the design of God that created the human being male and female, with a unity and at the same time an original and complementary difference. Human nature and the cultural dimension are integrated in an ample and complex process that constitutes the formation of the identity of each, where both dimensions — the feminine and the masculine — correspond to and complete each other.
439. The real philistines are not those people incapable of recognizing beauty — they recognize it only too well, with a flair as infallible as that of the subtlest aesthete, but only to pounce on it and smother it before it can take root in their universal empire of ugliness.
440. Freedom is not license; freedom must have as its end the full development in persons of what it means to be truly human.
441. Reason is a natural faculty, both empirical and thus good in the realm of science and also moral and thus sufficient for binding and foundational law; it is further an experience by which humans negotiate the tensions of existence, thus formative of order in the soul and by extension in the collective souls of a community.
442. Civilization was laboriously achieved and only precariously defended. Its defense must be fully manned, as many are gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.
443. The finest form of charity is to enable a poor man to support himself with honor and usefulness.
444. The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, and social. Humans want their wishes to come true; they want the universe to care about them; they want the esteem of peers. For most, wanting to know the truth about the world is far down the list, and scientific objectivity is a freakish, unnatural, and unpopular mode of thought, restricted to small cliques whom the generality of citizens regard with dislike and mistrust.
445. Multiculturalism provides the rootless consumer, whether of cuisine or ideas, with a wide variety of lifestyle options and choices, pieces to try, taste and enjoy, and throw away. Oh, the horror of commitment to a quotidian existence! If only we could all be world travelers, unbounded by zip codes and responding with 'Earth' when asked the address of home! Multiculturalism feeds the perverse desire to crown oneself with the epithet 'itinerant,' even the bank account does not allow for such freedoms. Multiculturalism’s dramatic rise in popularity is due also to a lack real interests, as the sheen of glamour fades and a new goal must quickly be established. The goal is attained, the lifestyle is tried on and experienced, found to be as superficial and unsatisfying as the previous ends, and the peripatetic continues roving. Multiculturalism may superficially gratify restless hearts, but how many decades must be wasted before the realization that no foundation built on sand can ever support a home?
446. The most enduring forms of order are not built, but grown over time. Humans cannot always understand the advantages of the current social order.
447. There is no such thing as a “writing talent.” Anyone can be taught to write a good sentence. What writers are born with is a “third ear,” not for words but for human nature.
448. Political is boring, sanctimonious and dreary.
449. Elites generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. But it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit, is galvanized by modernization, and in one form or another, it will drive global politics for generations to come. Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic society, ethnic disaggregation or partition is often the least bad answer.
450. The goal of teaching should be to make certain that students understand the perspectives and rich debates that have shaped the dialogue of civilization, not to create disciples of a worldview. Students should learn how to read deeply, how to analyze, how to locate the essential points of similarity and divergence among thinkers, and how to understand, with intellectual empathy, how the world looks from the diverse perspectives that constitute the history of thought.
451. Humans are inclined to believe those whom they do not know because they have never deceived.
452. Language is the dress of thought; every time one talks the mind is on parade.
453. Hope is itself a species of happiness, and perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords. The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from hope to hope.
454. Where status for the beast of the field is determined by power, for man it is determined in innumerable ways because of language. And it is language that gives man rational thought.
455. Culture cannot be entrusted to the democratic process precisely because of the carelessness with words, the habit of unthinking cliché, which always arises when every person is regarded as having an equal right to expression.
456. Someone who fails in in private life has failed in their public life, because they are the beneficiaries of a public trust which requires them to live out their daily lives during their term in office with an ounce of moral character.
457. Conservatism, by its nature, is about reform. Reform is profoundly un-radical. It is about taking existing institutions that have strayed from their original purpose, that are failing to achieve the goals they set out to achieve, and revitalizing them.
458. The basic antagonism of economic life is that work is toilsome and necessarily serves someone else’s interests.
459. Prejudice renders a man’s virtue his habit. Through just prejudice, his duty becomes a part of his nature. In seeking to relieve of prejudice, the supposedly well-meaning also seek to relieve of those unspoken commitments that families and local organizations have painstakingly sought to instill.
460. Instead of trying to achieve the ideal, instead of letting the ideal dominate, it can be best to set the ideal off on a distant plateau, give it respect, and acknowledge its beauty. Then, shake the spell off and get back to fumbling through the here and now.
461. Multiculturalism follows inexorably from the rejection of a universal human nature. If there is no single human nature, then there is no single standard for human excellence. Indeed, there is no single standard for anything, from rationality to morality. When rationality and morality are reduced to social constructions, the best humans can do is learn how societies construct things, rather than why certain constructions endure the test of time. Learning becomes a matter of uncovering the social and historical context behind every book and every idea. Rather than ask what a text has to teach, it is asked what the text is trying to hide. And the answer to that question is presupposed from the start: what is foundational to all social constructions just happens to be what is so self-congratulatory about modern education. All books and ideas are trying to hide their prejudices about race, gender, and class. Learning is about identifying with the experiences of the victims of "social injustice" - experiences that will be held up as absolutely different. All of this is profoundly anti-Christian, as Christians believe in universal human nature and universal truth claims about human nature, even as not every statement about human nature is true.
462. Marriage is an intrinsic good in itself because it bridges the difference between the sexes, uniting man and woman in one flesh. It marks a sacred rite of passage — entry into a fundamental commitment that binds the individual to a larger purpose and community. And although marriage unites two distinct and morally responsible individuals, it is no more about the individuals than it is about their union into one — a marriage that unites and transcends their individual purposes and desires, which henceforth are to be fulfilled in, through, and in concert with the other.
463. The collapse of public moral standards and the vast expansion in the notion of individual rights are make it increasingly difficult to deny right to fulfill desires, whatever they may be. In the revolt against the allegedly unjust and discriminatory authoritarianism of morality, there is lost any ground from which to draw moral lines.
464. Highly polished existentialism, radical autonomy, contempt for tradition and authority, and the elevation of youthful indulgence is more seductive than its better, reason free from passion.
465. It is difficult to face the notion that the gap between becoming who one is and being who one is rapidly closes. There is the realization that the world is not of infinite possibilities; that by one's own choices one has decisively forclosed certain avenues; and that the net effect is rapid convergence on a person one had not yet met or even imagined the existence of: oneself. It comes uninvited.
466. The sway of "theory" is terrible: a stylistically barbarous, philosophically frivolous mode of writing and thinking that reduces great art and all sorts of human achievement and historical fact to arbitrary linguistic categories and oppressive power structures. A deconstructive obsession with "difference" amounts to a betrayal of the humanities, of the students, of the university mission. The abdication of educational responsibility leaves students to their worst instincts, a juvenile nihilism and self-infatuation. Literature has the ability to express the sorrows and joys of life. It can tell truths of the human condition.
467. Legal principles are pragmatic solutions to real-world disputes.
468. Unmasking arbitrariness in others is a defense against doing so in the self.
469. Emotivism informs a great deal of contemporary moral utterance and practice, and the central characters of modern society embody such emotivist modes.
470. The nation-state is a state in which law springs from within, expressing the mutuality and the common allegiance of the people. In such a state there is a clear perception of the limits to law, and a jealous attachment to freedom. The best task is not to roll back its frontiers, but to re-establish the frontiers of the nation-state, and to reanimate the natural hostility citizens feel toward laws that are imposed by people with whom they do not belong.
471. There is a conflicting premise of decent governance: the abstract ideal of autonomy, however admirable, is radically incomplete. Individuals have free will; they can make choices, act on reasons, and are guided by conception of what exists and what is wished. Yet the form of freedom requires a content. Freedom is of no use to a being, living in a solipsistic vaccum, lacking the concepts with which to value things. The ends of conduct cannot be derived from the idea of choice alone. There must be a showing of how the agent values the intention of action. Through what concepts, and through what perceptions, is the end represented as desirable?
472. The power of tradition is twofold: it makes history into reason, and therefore the past into a present aim; second, tradition arises from every organization in society, and is no more trapping of the exercise of power. Traditions arise and command respect wherever individuals seek to relate themselves to something transcendent.
473. Words have lost their percision - not in spite of science, but because of it; not in spite of the loss of true religious belief, but because of it; not in spite of the proliferation of technical terms, but because of it. Modern ways of speaking veil the world since they convey no lived response; they are mere counters in a game of cliche, designed to fill up silence, to conceal the void.
474. Society is indeed a contract; but not a contract among the living only; rather, it is a partnership between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. And only those who listen to the dead are fit custodians of future generations.
475. Religion is the lifeblood of a culture. It provides the store of symbols, stories and doctrines that enable us to communicate about our destiny. It forms, through the sacred texts and liturgies, the constant point to which the poet and the critic can return—the language alike of ordinary believers and of the poets who must confront the ever-new conditions of life in the aftermath of knowledge, of life in a fallen world.
476. Humans can do nothing unless they first amend themselves. The task is to rediscover the world which made them, to see themselves as part of something greater, which depends upon them for its survival.
477. Secularists emphasize rights because, having rejected the idea of an objective moral order, they exalt unfettered freedom. What freedom is for merits little attention.
478. A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve is the definition of a statesman.
479. Viewing the inescapable difference between the sexes as political and pop-scientific grievance does grave harm to women.
480. Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
481. Mass immigration is class war against the domestic poor.
482. Correlation is not causality.
483. Science isn't absolute, it's relative. It's a process for increasing the relative accuracy of predictions. The more accurate compared to randomness predictions get, the more scientific they are.
484. Racism and segregation violate human dignity and restrict individual liberty and inappropriately extend state power. This is a well-defined, tangible injustice that leads to a specific solution - new laws that guarantee individual rights. Racism and segregation as an implication of society rather than a violation of individual rights are a more amorphous feeling that leads to an ever-shifting set of “solutions” that naturally create an expanded public presence in the form of new government agencies and programs. It’s not surprising that a more broad feeling of “guilt” leads to constantly evolving policy responses as its not possible to assuage a generally guilty conscience. Shifting blame from individuals to more amorphous “forces” makes it nearly impossible that the guilt will ever disappear.
485. Liberty and self-government require a cohesive culture, which in turn requires strong family ties, which in turn requires traditional morality.
486. The Kingdom of God cannot be coerced into existence by any amount of social or political effort. It remains the gift of God and of the returning Lord to a world that cannot perfect itself by its own efforts.
487. Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing. It should not be written with a capital G or so as to refer to people.
488. Marriage is part of all cultures because it's both hard and necessary. It works when it's the standard solution to the problem of heterosexuality. The more distant this bedrock, the harder it is to sustain marriage culture.
489. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
490. The state must not be the means by which society could be redeemed collectively. There will never be a kingdom as the complete ideal of human society to be realized on earth. Sin is not something that is committed by a society; sin is something committed by an individual.
491. An experiment in self-government will fail if the people who constitute the political community cannot self-govern. And individuals will not adequately self-govern unless commanded by some divine, natural law.
492. Example is the school of mankind and they will learn at no other.
493. When neither their property nor their honor is touched, the majority of men live content.
494. God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation, and thus the capacity and responsibility, of love and communion. Yet, some protest, it is really only power that matters. This view conceals a revolutionary expectation, one that pushes toward a humanity in which no distinction between individuals is tolerated, one where everyone performs the same functions. But this is gravely contrary to the complementarity at the heart of God's design. The harmony of the couple and of society depends in part on the way in which the complementarity, needs, and mutual support between the genders are lived. Each of the genders is an image of the power and tenderness of God, with equal dignity though in a different way.
495. A sense of grievance or entitlement, as a result of the mistreatment of ancestors, is not likely to get one very far with people who are too busy dealing with current economic and family realities to spend much time thinking about their own ancestors, much less other people’s ancestors.
496. Love of beauty and home are those motives that keep people in real and reciprocal relation with each other, whether here and now, or across the generations.
497. Despair is the parent of achievement.
498. In necessary things unity, in undecided things freedom, and in all things charity.
499. It is clear that the mandarins have a pretty good idea of just what the rhetoric of community buys them practically. Power, for one thing. When entrenched privilege finds itself threatened by new and aggressive forms of energetic activity, it typically counters the danger by using the power of the state (disguised into an agency of noblesse oblige or social solidarity) to cement an alliance with those at the bottom of the heap. Decaying patrician orders have historically maintained their preeminence by taking the lower depths in hand and giving them the benefit of a (wise and benevolent) paternal superintendence.
500. The public adores the familiar, even if all they know is that it should be familiar.
501. Many theorists are saddled with a doomed task, trying to fit the square peg of reality into the round hole of hope. Sometimes things just are what they are. And wishful theory is no match for nature’s stubborn ambition.
502. If love is true, a true thing really existing as an object to which the universe itself must bend, then there remains a place for reticence, and secrets swallowed, and the dead allowed to keep their darkness to themselves.
503. A political order must be built on an underlying reality such as kinship. Common ancestry, a common homeland and a shared history are not arbitrary. A nation is like a large, intermarrying extended family; and family ties are ties that bind. It is nearly impossible to kick someone out of your family. That is why a stable, free and democratic form of government can only be based on the shared interests of a dominant ethnic or religious group. Humans need some palpable, concrete link to each other in order to co-operate and built communities. It may not be pretty, but it is a much more stable basis for a humane society than airy words about universal human rights. Politics means working with human material as it is, not as we wish it would be. Small numbers of individuals can be adopted into the tribe, but they must intermarry and give themselves over totally to their new loyalties. Importing large numbers of minorities is a recipe for disaster. They, quite naturally, want to stick to their own kind. Once a critical mass is reached, they don't intemarry and don't assimilate, even when heavily pressured to do so. The groupness of an individual often matters more to them than their individuality. This is deeply ingrained in human nature and cannot be wished away. Any political order that tries to totally overcome this instead of working with it does so at its own peril. We cannot achieve the City of God here on earth; we can only achieve smaller, local goods. Trying to achieve the former often endagers that latter. Basing political rights on shared familial ties may not be a perfect fulfillment of the obligation to love all mankind, but it produces a concrete good which we should not blithely throw away in pursuit of heaven on earth.
504. Do not be too cavalier towards the benefits of the rule of law. Order, even an unjust order, is preferable to chaos. Slavery was unjust, yet St. Paul advised Christians to accept it. That does not mean one cannot try to change things, but it does not justify total upheaval of the temporal order. Morality demands thought, not just feeling.
505. Love involves a totality, in which all the elements of the person enter - appeal of the body and instinct, power of feeling and affectivity, aspiration of the spirit and of the will. Love aims at a deeply personal unity, a unity that, beyond union in one flesh, leads to forming one heart and soul; it demands indissolubility and faithfulness in definitive mutual giving; and it is open to fertility.
506. Most people tend away from goodness, beauty and truth and towards the simple, superficial and self-serving.
507. Any attack against hierarchy in thought or culture in service of fighting power and hierarchy is trying to establish power as a hierarch.
508. It is impossible to reason without ordering principles, and ordering principles imply hierarchy.
509. There is a universal pivot of the human will, the desire of each human to live a purposeful, and morally and intellectually consistent, life.
510. Hooked on political correctness and incapable of doing without the daily diversity fix, the universal character is regarded as an offshoot of the melting pot and the conclusion is that the reactionaries are up to their old tricks.
511. To those who despise religion and worship science, the idea of special grace is an outrage, for science is neutral with respect to all peoples and all times. Since the boast of enlightened, rational promise, many have wanted the authority to order problems according to an image of man in anything but man in the image of God.
512. Society should be seen not in terms of abstraction or slogans, but in terms of the people it produces, the energy combined with self-reliance and quirkiness.
513. Calls to indict may be a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out and ultimately to bring it down.
514. Noticing similarities and differences is one of the fundamental methods of gaining knowledge about the world. Knowledge is useful because it allows for making more accurate predictions about reality, which allows for better decisions.
515. Humans like things unpredictable, but with a comprehensible narrative logic.
516. The only thing that can stop the lethal anarchy in many neighborhoods is personal responsibility, starting with the duty of men to raise the children that they sire. What is most needed is self-control and respect for fellow human beings. There is very little the government can do to make up for those deficits. When the marriage norm has disappeared from a culture, the greatest civilizing force disappears as well. Young men who know that they can endlessly inseminate girls without getting a wife or having to support their children have no incentive to develop the stable character and work habits that would make them an attractive husband and employee. And the boys raised in those fatherless households have a much lower chance of receiving the parental discipline and guidance necessary to keep them out of trouble.
517. There are three historic cultures of the world: 1st world, which was pagan, 2nd world, which was sacred order Jewish, Christian, and Muslim, and 3rd world, which is modern and postmodern and the negation of all sacred orders.
518. Heaven is the locale of the greatest conversations, most beautiful music, and truest poetry and drama - at last, full communion.
519. Freedom and tolerance are so often separated from truth. This is fuelled by the notion that there are no absolute truths to guide our lives. Relativism, by indiscriminately giving value to practically everything, has made 'experience' all-important. Yet, experiences, detached from any consideration of what is good or true, can lead, not to genuine freedom, but to moral or intellectual confusion, to a lowering of standards, to a loss of self-respect, and even to despair.
520. Change is constant; and the great question is not whether to resist change, which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws and traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles, and arbitrary and general doctrines.
521. All societal problems are cultural and moral; all cultural and moral problems are familial.
522. There is a long history of revolutions that refuse to acknowledge the reality of humans. Humans are irrational animals as well as intellectual creatures. Human traditions and religions evolved with them. The purposes of those traditions and religions are not easily explained. Destroy them and find out why they existed.
523. All goals, such as justice, community, and love, which make human life into a thing of intrinsic value, have origin in the mutual accountability of persons, who respond to each other I to I. Humans are thus satisfied that they understand the world and know its meaning when they can see it as the form of another I - the I of God, in which all stand judged, and from which love and freedom flow.
524. Humans have an innate need to conceptualize the world in terms of the transcendental, and to live out the distinction between the sacred and the profane. This need is rooted in self-consciousness and in the experience that remind of shared destiny. Insecurity and disorder come from the tension in which humans are held when they cannot attach inner awareness of the transcendental to the outward forms of religious ritual.
525. The Enlightenment dream that Reason alone can disclose authoritative truths to live by has been shown to have been empty. All Reason alone gives is radical subjectivity. It has shown how and why to doubt everything, but does not demonstrate why humans should believe in anything other than the truths disclosed by science - which aren't moral truths at all.
526. Specific government policies tend to matter less than the quantities and qualities of various populations.
527. If each man's morality is defined merely to suit himself, then everyone will endure the consequences of the individual's autonomously defined ethics.
528. Many defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.
529. The young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.
530. Everything fails by irrevelant standards.
531. Nearly all men can stand adversity. To test a man’s character, give him power.
532. Modernism, prosperity, a fetishization of the collective, and original sin are a terribly lethal combination.
533. Only fidelity to conscience and to the wellsprings of goodness within the soul allows one to affirm the true goodness of life and the essentially moral character of human existence.
534. Some ideas are eventually undermined by a massive onslaught of circumstances with which they cannot contend.
535. Youth is easily deceived because it is quick to hope.
536. Every nationality, every ethnicity, prefers to be misgoverned by its own people than to be well ruled by another.
537. A free-market system must not rely solely upon economics as the source of order. In this reliance lay the great mistake of nineteenth-century apologists for capitalism; in fact, only a solid social structure predicated upon individual virtue, cohesive families, and local communities could counterbalance the frequently disruptive side-effects of the dynamic, highly efficient market system. A decay in those fundamental building blocks of social order must lead to atomization, alienation and ever increasing demands for state control over the economy.
538. The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.
539. Human nature is unchanging across time and space and thus predictable.
540. Unequal outcomes are unproblematic so long as rules and barriers to entry are clear and objective. It is wrong to have different standards and barriers to entry solely based on an unchangable, inherent characteristic. To do so is to first serve ideology, in a patronizing and condescending fashion, which breeds resentment and legitimate insecurity.
541. Humans have liberated fantasy but killed imagination, and so have sealed themselves in selfishness and loneliness. Fantasy is of the solitary self, and it cannot lead away from self. It is by imagination that humans cross over the differences between themselves and other beings and thus learn compassion, forbearance, mercy, forgiveness, sympathy, and love.
542. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
543. Morality is any system of interlocking values, practices, institutions, and psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate selfishness and make social life possible.
544. It is comforting to believe that leaders who do terrible things are, in fact, mad. That way, all voters have to do is make sure they don’t put psychotics in high places and problems can be solved.
545. There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just.
546. One of the objects of a mature political philosophy is to reconcile people to the painful limitations of their condition.
547. Poetry should stand for a principle of order in the human soul, in society and in the universe. The old poetic culture of the West, with its emphasis on harmony, proportion, and order, brought coherence to the world and did much to reconcile men and women to the larger rhythms of life. The roots of this culture grew out of the Greek belief that poetry and music, together with rhythm and harmony, powerfully influence the mind and are therefore one of the bases of civilization. If a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.
548. Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
549. For much of humanity, morality is genetic affinity plus expedience plus quid pro quo plus self-serving status posturing.
550. Every man is guilty of all the good he didn’t do.
551. The spending of a population is based on its wealth. In the long run, its wealth is mostly a function of its human capital - the population's ability to earn money. It is important to not debauch the average human capital of a population.
552. Conscience is the mind thinking morally. It is the human ability to reason not just logically or pragmatically, but according to the categories of right and wrong, and of good, better and best. It is practical moral knowledge.
553. No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
554. Information is different from knowledge, and it has nothing at all to do with wisdom.
555. False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
556. The tension between dead hope and unwelcome reality is acute, resolvable only, as is always the case with such psychic stresses, by doublethink.
557. Culture is, first and foremost, a normative order by which humans comprehend themselves, others, and the larger world and through which they order experience.
558. To hold together a multiethnic or multilingual state, either an authoritarian regime or a dominant ethnocultural core is essential. Mass immigration benefits the ruling elites economically by crippling the middle class and depreciating the price of labor, politically by supplying statist voters, and culturally by deracinating the ethnocultural core. Mass immigration, particularly of incompatible newcomers, is a classic divide-and-conquer strategy of the ruling classes.
559. College bottles up thousands of hormone infused, immature youths in one place, gives them all the comforts of life for free, and requires virtually nothing of the student in return. It's a perfect recipe for creating spoiled brats.
560. A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.
561. Condemning people in the past is a way of misplacing guilt, a way of saying, "I’m morally superior to you," so as to feel better and not own up to personal, current sins.
562. Indispensable social institutions, such as marriage, really are rooted in biological imperatives. Humans really are belonging and begetting beings - social animals, and a lot of our happiness comes from following natural, social inclinations.
563. Anarchists are leftists who are mad at government because they are not in charge. Anarchism is especially appealing to youths because they have so little power and such low status. People have instinctive desire for power and status, hence the violence.
564. Inequality is inherent in human life.
565. The emphasis on the individual has been at the expense of the associative and symbolic relationships that must in fact uphold the individual’s sense of integrity. Once, both human material and spiritual needs had been met by non-state institutions. The family was a locus of identity, as well as the vital economic base for food, housing, and education. Churches and guilds provided economic support as well as creating identity. When the expanding liberal nation-state began to usurp economic functions, and to perform them more efficiently, people no longer turned to these intermediate institutions. Without the strong connection of physical need, bonds between individuals and institutions grew tenuous and no longer created meaning and community.
566. Natural law, which is at the root of the recognition of true equality between persons and peoples, deserves to be recognized as the source that inspires the relationship between the spouses in their responsibility for begetting new children. The transmission of life is inscribed in nature and its laws stand as an unwritten norm to which all must refer.
567. Culture matters. How humans talk about society helps form society. And the kind of society humans have places enormous constraints on economic mechanisms and the economic expectations and ambitions of individuals and the public.
568. Success is when opportunity meets preparation.
569. Terrorism is a tactic, a technique, a weapon that fanatics, dictators and warriors have resorted to through history. If war is the continuation of politics by other means, terrorism is the continuation of war by other means. Yet terrorism – the killing of innocents for political ends – can only triumph if the aggrieved play the role the terror masters have scripted for them in their bloody drama.
570. Children are the living messages humans send to a time they will not see.
571. A social order has to have something in it that inspires love.
572. Folly’s reservoir never runs dry.
573. Civilizations exist because men wish to overcome death, and have learned that ties of blood and language are not sufficient to win immortality. They require a form of social organization that rises above mere ethnicity, that promises a higher form of continuity between the dead and the yet unborn. But supplanting the ties of blood and language is a daunting task at which most civilizations ultimately fail. Mortality becomes nearly unbearable in the face of modernity.
574. To overcome mortality humans create culture, a dialogue among generations that links the dead with the yet unborn. Without the hope of immortality they cannot bear mortality. Cultures that have lost the hope of immortality also lose the will to live.
575. Islam parodies Christianity. Christianity proposes to incorporate all of humanity into the new People of God, by effecting an inner transformation of every individual. By this transformation, Christians believe, all of humanity can become holy. Islam offers a universal religion not of inner transformation, but of obedience. Precisely this form of surface universalism ensures that Muslims carry the baggage of traditional life into the new religion, for it offers no point of departure from traditional society. As a universal religion, Islam can only universalize the aspirations of the tribes it assimilates, rather than transform them, and cannot rid itself of its pagan heritage. Instead, it lashes out against the encroachment of more adaptive civilizations.
576. The pitting of freedom against truth is the original sin of the liberalism. The truth about freedom is that there is no freedom apart from truth.
577. Whenever orthodoxy becomes optional, it will sooner or later be proscribed.
578. There is a decisive importance of civil society for a flourishing social order, and above all for the poor. The weakening of mediating institutions like the family, church, vibrant neighborhoods, and voluntary associations, which form our moral affinities grant fortitude and character to live meaningful lives as citizens, empower not people but the suffocating bureaucratic state. A democracy without civil society will soon be no democracy at all.
579. Women often hate working for other women. While men compete for status by trying to include as many underlings as possible in their hierarchies, women gain prestige by excluding the maximum number from their cliques.
580. The less humans deserve good fortune, the more they hope for it.
581. Enforced egalitarianism entails the death of excellence. It seizes the rewards that excellence earns and turns them over to politicians and bureaucrats for distribution to the mediocrities upon whose votes they depend.
582. The companion of autonomy is loneliness.
583. Religion seems to be intuitive belief in some sort of presiding, which seems to be an extremely common, albeit hardly universal, feature of human nature; this intuition has intersected, historically, with an enormous amount of subjective religious experience; and this intersection (along with the force of custom and tradition) has produced and sustained the religious traditions.
584. To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes the wise and good learn wisdom for the future.
585. Habits become character.
586. The world is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel.
587. When a society loses its memory, it descends inevitably into dementia.
588. If you would civil your land, first you should civil your speech.
589. Charisma is the ability to make other people wholeheartedly buy into narcissism.
590. Politics is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.
591. Children are the wealth of nations, provided that their nations can put tools in their hands and the rule of law at their back. Countries that lack children are poor.
592. Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.
593. It is a weakness of human nature to imagine the most antagonistic motives of another person if what that person says is not thematically consistent with the narrative playing out in one’s head.
594. Unintended consequences predominate in education because the reigning dogma of the education industry — the intellectual equality of all students — is wrong. This obdurate refusal on the part of everybody who is anybody in the education business to admit publicly the manifold implications of some kids being smarter than others makes it difficult to get anything done in the real world.
595. Grace must wound before it can heal.
596. Marriage as an individual right offers no cultural basis for helping people answer the questions that matter most.
597. Homogeneity evokes loyalty, stability and harmony.
598. The health of a nation is inversely proportional to the number of laws needed to govern it.
599. One cannot be a conservative and an uncritical admirer of free market capitalism, which is the most revolutionary force ever known.
600. Humans must adapt to changing times with unchanging principles.
601. Children are our wealth, and families its custodian.
602. Ideas create idols; only wonder leads to knowing.
603. The ceaseless labor of life is to build the house of death.
604. Creative art arises from participation in the mind of God.
605. To destroy the morality of a people is to completely break their will, to prepare the conditions through which they will happily submit to the most degrading slavery if it means they will have a steady supply of the poisons of their choice.
606. Contrary to the Enlightenment mentality, human beings are ritual creatures; they don't by nature simply feel or experience the divine; they ritualize it. Cultures have their times and seasons, their rituals and festivals, to mark major stages in human life: birth, marriage, death, harvest, victory, loss. So when human beings' rituals get changed, it hurts. With reference to Christianity, the times and seasons and rituals mark and make . The liturgy in particular goes back to the Last Supper, the synagogue, the Jewish Temple, the tabernacle, and ultimately Eden. Eden is actually a temple of the divine presence, the Tabernacle was the locus of the divine presence, and Solomon's temple and the second temple were built to reflect Eden and thus be the locus of the divine presence, and synagogues were representative of and oriented to the Jerusalem temple.
607. Much of modernity is deadly, as one cannot ultimately separate form and content. Form is essential, not accidental.
608. Dogs are our link to paradise. They don't know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring - it was peace.
609. Conflicts in a striving meritocracy can probably be managed more easily where there are groups whose membership of the nation is ambiguous, who are very dependent on elite sponsorship, and whose presence flushes out ethnocentric responses among the masses which can then be held against them. A society tied to the notion of meritocracy may therefore have a particular need for minorities.
610. True knowledge is ignorance. To proclaim one’s ignorance sincerely is to remain open to one’s historical, cultural, and cosmological place. Admitting one’s indebtedness requires a healthy dose of humility.
611. Liberalism depends on the modernist conviction that neither religion nor tradition nor inherited loyalties has any binding authority. Anything that denies equal freedom is to be condemned as oppressive and marginalized, even outlawed. This is liberalism's "tyranny." Having abandoned the idea that the Good stands outside the individual's judgment, common life becomes a matter of negotiating preferences and satisfying wants.
612. Humans differ from each other in various ways because of different genotypes. Differences include, but are not limited to, physical appearance, athletic ability, personality, and cognitive abilities.
613. The law is the place where morality meets custom, and compromise, and common sense.
614. Orators are most vehement when their cause is weak.
615. Whatever fortune has raised to a height, she has raised only to cast it down.
616. The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.
617. Monopolies produce high prices and low quality. This is especially true of the government supported monopolies of corporatism.
618. In order to live well, humans must work to bring habits to accord with reflective beliefs.
619. Knowledge is important not when it first becomes available but when an audience becomes available to absorb and act on the knowledge.
620. The secular state is the guarantee of religious pluralism. This apparent paradox is the simplest and most elegant of political truths.
621. The results of cognitive testing are an important reality, not because they predict everything perfectly, but because they predict better than anything else, and because they are consequential for so many areas of life.
622. A movement in thought or art produces its best work during the uphill fight to oust the enemy; that is, the previous thought or art. Victory brings on imitation and ultimately Boredom.
623. Sooner or later, everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.
From:
Elizabeth Anscombe, Hannah Arendt, Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Augustine, Marcus Aurelius, Jacques Barzun, Frederic Bastiat, Hilaire Belloc, William F. Buckley, Jr., Edmund Burke, G.K. Chesterton, Cicero, Anthony Daniels, Fyodor Dostoevsky, T.S. Eliot, Benjamin Franklin, Johann Goethe, Romano Guardini, Friedrich Hayek, Christopher Hitchens, Paul Johnson, Samuel Johnson, Russell Kirk, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Abraham Lincoln, Henri de Lubac, Joseph de Maistre, Harvey Mansfield, Richard John Neuhaus, John Henry Newman, Robert Nisbet, Michael Oakshott, Pierre Manent, Plato, Joseph Ratzinger, Philip Reiff, Wilhelm Röpke, Roger Scruton, Socrates, Thomas Sowell, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Pyotr Stolypin, David Stove, Thucydides, Alexis de Tocqueville, Evelyn Waugh, Richard Weaver, Karol Wojtyla
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