Divini Illius Magistri and RC Social Teaching Are Wrong on This Point

Peter Kwasniewski:

First, the encyclical asserts and defends throughout the fundamental, inviolable right of parents to educate their own children (31ff.) and of the Church to educate the whole of mankind, especially those who are already her children by grace (15ff.). This right belongs naturally to the parents and supernaturally to the Church, and only by parental or ecclesiastical permission to the State or its officials.

One can understand this as an attempt to respond to the state and its abuse of power but taken as an absolute, it is wrong. The community (or the tribe) also has a right to educate the young, especially the males, and while parents are the primary teachers, they are not the only teachers, and there is no "delegation" of the exercise of this right to others -- they are exercising their own responsibility towards the young. The customs or laws that order behavior in a community or tribe, especially behavior towards others, are not determined by the family alone, but by the community (or its representatives), and parents aren't the only one with the authority to admonish or correct the young if the young fail to observe these laws. (Whether other adults have the authority to punish children or if this is delegated is a question worthy of attention.)

If there is someone in the tribe who is unqualified to teach, then he should not be teaching, but this is true of parents as well, and even more so. To accept a theologoumenon from a pope as if it is a part of Divine Tradition is a mistake but ultramontanist Latins, despite their intellectual manuevering on the "limits of infallibility" and "different levels of authority" still suffer from a slavishly uncritical attachment to papal opinions.

Uh... No.

Austen knows virtue for women. But she knows very little about virtue for men.

Amanda Patchin: “Jane Austen is, more than Plato, more than Aristotle, more than Alisdair MacIntyre, the philosopher of virtue. . . . Thus, she is the author to read as you embark on the new year.” https://t.co/zAmgFgMKWj pic.twitter.com/QRNrGBcDrL

— Front Porch Republic (@FrontPorchRepub) January 1, 2021

Gottfried on Aristotle's Politics

“Aristotle denies the existence of an ideal government applicable to all societies; instead, he looks at various governments that are appropriate for different peoples in different situations,” Paul Gottfried writes. https://t.co/1vxSCfpNOP

— Chronicles Magazine (@ChroniclesMag) November 24, 2020

Although there have been various attempts to “democratize” Aristotle, it may be necessary to understand the very circumscribed form in which Aristotle understood self-rule. It was an exercise in political autonomy practiced by a culturally homogeneous group made up of male-dominated households. Remnants of this Aristotelian model can still be found in early American society and in the traditional Swiss Republic. But trying to relate Aristotle’s concept of a viable democracy to current political preferences would be a bit of a stretch.

An Attempt to Interpet Aristotle as a Proponent of an Egalitarian, Companionate Model of Marriage

Angela McKay Knobel

What would it mean for true friendship to exist in a marriage? https://t.co/ObDBTGdw71

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) July 26, 2020

Aristotle does think that there can be friendship between husband and wife; but this friendship is grounded upon the sex differences that exist between men and women, and Aristotle does not ignore the role of leadership that is proper to the husband, nor the requisite virtues that are thereby required of women as wives. A "conservatism" uses a watered-down Aristotle to advance feminism is no conservatism and its bad scholarship, too.

A Liberal Trumpets Individualism Against Aristotle

ISI: INDIVIDUALISM IN ANCIENT GREECE by John W. Danford
An excerpt from Danford’s Roots of Freedom: A Primer on Modern Liberty, which is apparently out of print.

You've heard the phrase, "man is a political being."

There are two problems with it: https://t.co/kJpbMZDh2D

— Intercollegiate Studies Institute (@ISI) May 26, 2020

And Who Are the Representatives of Statism?

The shock that comes upon learning that Aristotle was not a liberal. The “Western tradition” is a series of disagreements, among the most significant between Aristotle and Locke.

— Patrick Deneen (@PatrickDeneen) May 2, 2020

Restoration of Christian Culture?

FB video ends prematurely.



Complete video on YT:


website

See also Byz, TX: Christendom, but why?


Related:

A Call to Aristotelianism

Resilience: Why Liberals Should be Conservative: Climate Change, Excellence, and the Practice of Happiness, Part 2 by Erik Lindberg
The Resurgent Aristotelians: Hopkins, Fleming, Francis, and Holmgren

From 2013

Some interesting thoughts on the Aristotelian polis and its relation to the Greek city-states. POLIS, STATE, AND THE COMMON GOOD by Joseph R. Stromberg

Cuckservative Academia

C.S. Lewis and Aristotle on Civic Friendship by Micah Watson

Apparently Professor Watson didn't read that part of the Nicomachean Ethics in which Aristotle explicitly talks about civic friendship. And it doesn't take much to develop his argument to the conclusion that civic friendship is incompatible with liberal pluralism, or competing identities. But the liberal must hold on to his liberal fantasyland as long as possible, rather than face the truth that utopia does not exist and he does not live in a community. Civility may be the appropriate response, or it may not be the appropriate response -- it depends on the circumstances and what the other person is saying or doing. Have we forgotten what Aristotelian phronesis is, too?

More conservatives speaking in ignorance of the alt-right and the reality of identity politics.

Identity and Ethnos in Socrates’s Athens: A Response to Jordan Wales by Jesse Russell

Disappointing to see something like this at FPR. If they have to be PC, it would be better if they just left the alt-right alone.

A Straussian Protests

And fails to persuade this paleo/alt-righter that he isn't part of the group trying to destroy historical America.

Good Grief, More Straussianism!

See also: More Straussianism

What does charity require?

I have no reason that even for Christians the liberal assumption that all people are equally rational is true, or that all Christians are capable of dialectic, as opposed to being accustomed to rhetoric. Are we required by charity to maintain the pretense that Christians are? Or should we instead relate to them according to how they actually are?

Charity is not opposed to justice.

Rod Dreher Should Read Sam Francis

But he probably won't. At least he's reading John Cuddeback. He wrote this last Monday: Politics, Family, & the Benedict Option

Except Not Everyone is Capable of Dialectic

Especially SJWs.

Something that socons (and "conservative" Catholics) fail to realize? In Search of Civil Discourse by Erika Bachiochi, linking to Randall Smith (part 1 and 2)

Some Aristotelian realism about people is warranted, rather than tired presuppositions of liberalism.

To be a Citizen

On Cities and Community by Tim Dunkin

Aristotelian Patriarchy

An exposition of Aristotle by a woman... does she agree with him regarding the inequality of man and woman in the family and in the political community?

Understanding Aristotle’s Account of the Relationship of the Household to the State by Beatrice Freccia

Part 2

FB

One of the 7 Deadly Sins

Greed explained: J. Paul Getty, Aristotle and the Maximum Power Principle (Resilience)

Imaginative Conservative: Aristotle on the Fullness of Social Living by Elizabeth Shaw

Worth Keeping In Mind

From Politics, 3.9

But a state exists for the sake of a good life, and not for the sake of life only: if life only were the object, slaves and brute animals might form a state, but they cannot, for they have no share in happiness or in a life of free choice. Nor does a state exist for the sake of alliance and security from injustice, nor yet for the sake of exchange and mutual intercourse; for then the Tyrrhenians and the Carthaginians, and all who have commercial treaties with one another, would be the citizens of one state. True, they have agreements about imports, and engagements that they will do no wrong to one another, and written articles of alliance. But there are no magistrates common to the contracting parties who will enforce their engagements; different states have each their own magistracies. Nor does one state take care that the citizens of the other are such as they ought to be, nor see that those who come under the terms of the treaty do no wrong or wickedness at an, but only that they do no injustice to one another. Whereas, those who care for good government take into consideration virtue and vice in states. Whence it may be further inferred that virtue must be the care of a state which is truly so called, and not merely enjoys the name: for without this end the community becomes a mere alliance which differs only in place from alliances of which the members live apart; and law is only a convention, 'a surety to one another of justice,' as the sophist Lycophron says, and has no real power to make the citizens

This is obvious; for suppose distinct places, such as Corinth and Megara, to be brought together so that their walls touched, still they would not be one city, not even if the citizens had the right to intermarry, which is one of the rights peculiarly characteristic of states. Again, if men dwelt at a distance from one another, but not so far off as to have no intercourse, and there were laws among them that they should not wrong each other in their exchanges, neither would this be a state. Let us suppose that one man is a carpenter, another a husbandman, another a shoemaker, and so on, and that their number is ten thousand: nevertheless, if they have nothing in common but exchange, alliance, and the like, that would not constitute a state. Why is this? Surely not because they are at a distance from one another: for even supposing that such a community were to meet in one place, but that each man had a house of his own, which was in a manner his state, and that they made alliance with one another, but only against evil-doers; still an accurate thinker would not deem this to be a state, if their intercourse with one another was of the same character after as before their union. It is clear then that a state is not a mere society, having a common place, established for the prevention of mutual crime and for the sake of exchange. These are conditions without which a state cannot exist; but all of them together do not constitute a state, which is a community of families and aggregations of families in well-being, for the sake of a perfect and self-sufficing life. Such a community can only be established among those who live in the same place and intermarry. Hence arise in cities family connections, brotherhoods, common sacrifices, amusements which draw men together. But these are created by friendship, for the will to live together is friendship. The end of the state is the good life, and these are the means towards it. And the state is the union of families and villages in a perfect and self-sufficing life, by which we mean a happy and honorable life.

Our conclusion, then, is that political society exists for the sake of noble actions, and not of mere companionship. Hence they who contribute most to such a society have a greater share in it than those who have the same or a greater freedom or nobility of birth but are inferior to them in political virtue; or than those who exceed them in wealth but are surpassed by them in virtue.