James Matthew Wilson on True Progress

I believe you need to read this now.

Our Virgilian Civilization (Or, the Devil Was the First Whig) https://t.co/7RmIzwud4B via @CatholicThing

— James Matthew Wilson (@JMWSPT) October 11, 2020

Liberal Regime?

Why not just the state, or the oligarchy?

“Our liberal regime was never a neutral arbiter, defending a free political realm while remaining itself agnostic about the good. It had always at its heart the state’s arbitrary imposition of its will.”https://t.co/xW4NGXQ2ey

— Josh Hochschild (@JoshHochschild) May 6, 2020

American Mind: “First to the Camps”: An Interpretation of Adrian Vermeule by James Matthew Wilson

One of the Few Good Things Currently Up at the Law and Liberty Website

Belloc’s Humane Defense of Personhood and Property by James Matthew Wilson
Perhaps the memory of that metaphysical right to property informs our fears, and could lead to a restoration of human flourishing.

Land!

Crisis: On John Crowe Ransom’s Newly Discovered Agrarian Classic BY JAMES MATTHEW WILSON
In 1930, “Twelve Southerners” published a thick volume of essays entitled I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Led by the already venerable poet and critic John [...]

“The Benedict Option: The Problems of Culture in Times of Crisis.”

Academy of Philosophy and Letters Conference - Info at FPR

Rod Dreher is the keynote speaker; other participants include Mark Mitchell, James Matthew Wilson, and Jeffrey Polet, Claes Ryn, and David Walsh). Walter McDougall will be the Saturday evening dinner speaker.

Not in the mood to put anything up today, check out the links to the side, especially Post Mortem and True Politics in the Wake of Obama.

James Matthew Wilson Offers a Description of Modernity

James Matthew Wilson, Against Rationalism, Idealism, and Abstraction
Part II in an ongoing series, Localism and the Universal Church. Read Part I here.

The traditionalist wishes to defend the reverence and deference due to inherited folk ways in spite of their appearances of irrationality, and often does so by taking a stand in defense of the irrational per se. Such is political romanticism. And the traditionalist presumes, understandably, that securing allegiance to a tradition will in turn keep in place the essential elements of a localized and intergenerational community. If one toes the line of spiritual tradition, the body of natural community will be sustained. If one demands fidelity and solidarity to one’s own as the highest if inexplicable good, one can secure the perseverance of an entire way of life. Modernity is consequently decried as rationalist, idealist, and abstracting—claims I take to be true, but perhaps not for the reasons the traditionalist critique would recognize.

Surely, modernity is beholden to this triad of fetishes. I would argue that insofar as modernity is “rationalistic,” it has ceased to believe in reason; insofar as it is idealist, it neglects not simply the body but the idea of reality; and insofar as it tends toward abstraction, it has failed rather than succeeded in being adequately critical of the concrete conditions of human knowledge.

I hope he elaborates more on what he takes to be the weakness of the traditionalist position is (as stated in the first paragraph).

Place and Community

James Matthew Wilson, The Problem of Place (Part I in an ongoing series, Localism and the Universal Church)

Place may be a principle of community for settled, agrarian societies, less so for nomadic or hunter-gatherer groups. I do think that having a place does promote stability and enable a community to progress culturally through the division of labor.

Santa Cruz Local Foods is changing hands - Big Changes. It is an example of how we do not accord people with roots and commitment to the "community" a priority over outsiders. Rather, who is able to live in a community is dictated by their ability to acquire and keep property. Those who have more money have more "rights" than those who have less.

Is it correct to point the finger at the tech industry and the government for favoring it? It may generate wealth for the state, but at the cost of community, as people from other states (and even other countries) settle here for jobs for themselves and the public schools for their children, displacing those who were born in the area but not created to work in the industry. The engineers who move here may be just looking out for their own interest, like everyone else, but disliking them for being voluntarily participating in the matrix comes easy.

Perhaps it is natural that the industry grew near certain universities here and on the east coast - but if it were cheap to relocate, what is to prevent what happened here from happening to some small town in, say, Idaho, if the local government decided to subsidize the transfer of companies from here to that state or town?

Some may claim that the freedom to move is integral to American identity and culture. How about, then, the freedom to move and easily retain citizenship? Is that also essential? If so, then maybe there is no hope for American culture, as the inordinate desire to move on the part of many destroys community.

American Conservative: Revolt of the Rich
Authoritarian Politics in the Age of Casino Capitalism
Payoff in the Pit of Plutocracy

VDare: Bad News For Immigration Patriots: Cardinal Timothy Dolan's "Close Working Relationship" With Romney

Elias Crim reviews The Hound of Distributism
(Houston Catholic Worker review from earlier this year)

Energy expert says world's oil production has peaked
Peak cheap oil is an incontrovertible fact

Related:
Medievalists.net: Hellenism and the Shaping of the Byzantine Empire - link to the paper
The Amish, Faith, and Community

Items of Interest, 25 May 2012

Thomas Fleming, Charity v. Welfare

Ron Paul's Paradoxes
Justin Raimondo, Interventionism and the Elites
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, Bet on Collapse

WINSLOW T. WHEELER, F-22 In A Dogfight

Growing Opposition as US Mulls Arming Domestic Drones

GARETH PORTER, Hard Line Failure in Nuke Talks


Economics:
KEVIN CARSON, Why Corporate Capitalism is Unsustainable (C4SS)

KunstlerCast #206: Live Audience Podcast @ CNU (mp3)

New Urbanism Blog: Beware the 18%

All Together Now – 05/17/12 (mp3)
Localization and the Economics of Happiness

Making the Case for Economic Relocalization

The Emergence of the Fix-It Society
RALPH NADER, The Rise of Re-Use

Sale at Chelsea Green.

Higher Education:
Universal Uniformity in the University by James Matthew Wilson

Diet and Health:
MovNat: Movement Brings Us Together
The Ninth MovNat Principle: Cooperative

Feminism:
The New Feminist Agenda: A social revolution encourages us all to invest in family care
Woman Stirred Radio Madeline Kunin and Barbara Vacarr interview May 17 2012 wgdr-wgdh

Music:
Roll in My Sweet Baby's Arms - Sleepy Man Banjo Boys


TV:
TV Preview: 'Closer' Team Brings 'Longmire' To The Screen

What or whose tradition?

This post at Patriactionary caused me to reconsider to whom I am referring with the label "traditional conservative": An Ethos or a Script?  Novaseeker was criticizing people I would call social or religious conservatives, who are not necessarily traditional and usually supporters of the Republican Party, and defenders of "free market capitalism" as it exists in the United States.

"Traditional conservative" could refer to Southern agrarians and Southern conservatives. Or to Russell Kirk and those who have been influenced by him (and Burke), including various people affiliated with ISI (though some of them are also "capitalists"). Rarely do I use it in such a way as to include traditionalist Catholics. Paleos are usually reckoned traditional conservatives too; I can't think of any exceptions at the moment. Here are explanations of traditional conservatism by Harry Beadle, James Kalb, James Matthew Wilson.

It is reasonable for those who look to tradition to look to the pedigree of the tenets or to the number of adherents, pointing to something that stretches into the past. Tradition (or true opinion) may be sufficient for the many, but to defend the tradition and render it more intelligible one must be able to articulate the reasons supporting its content. As an Aristotelian, I believe this is accomplished through the appropriate scientiae, especially ethics and politics. A tradition will contain precepts of the natural law, but some (most?) of these will be transmitted through custom or positive law. The use of ethics and politics can explain those precepts. (I'm ignoring at this time those precepts related to God.) Catholics will also make use of the Church's teachings on the natural law.

So is there one tradition that unifies American traditional conservatives? This is a question I have been pondering. It would seem that there may be a split between nationalists (or unitarians) and federalists, and the second group might be divided by the question of the Constitution into Federalists and Anti-Federalists. Southern conservatives are more Anti-Federalist than Federalist, harboring some suspicion of the letter of the Constitution being sufficient to constrain the "Federal" Government

Do we "pick and choose" our tradition? Or do we have to adopt what is lived by a community, with ties to the past, some history, and kept alive by the succession of generations? Or do we just have to accept what we have received from our family and from others? It would seem that tradition only exists where it is shared and lived and passed on to one's children.

However, how strict should we be in our use of the name tradition? We are primarily concerned with the tradition that guides and shapes community life, and not just anything that is handed down from one's predecessors. This tradition is not a substantial unity, and is composed of many parts, the beliefs, customs and laws, language, material culture, and so on. Certain communities may share the same language and revered texts while differing in their music and so on. (I was thinking about songs and how they are kept alive in a community during the April Verch concert last weekend. I think the "professionalization" of music has distorted our understanding of music as an important component of communal life, and professional musicians are not the same as wandering minstrels.) But the high arts of a community will still embody the values of their community, for example the lyrics of the songs or the aesthetic judgment of the community regarding older forms of visual art. Still, the arts are the products of a people, but the beliefs and customs are the more integral part of their identity. (The work of an artist or artisan may be integral to his identity as an artist or artisan, but not as a member of that people or community?)

Tradition can be acquired through the reading of texts. (Dr. Fleming, for instance, recommends that we read Aristotle and Cicero.) It is not the case that tradition must always be passed on orally. But how much can the study of texts be separated from life within a concrete community? Many Americans conservatives have an appreciation of the classics and yet I would hesitate to group them together as one people.

What can be done about the "ugly duckling syndrome"? What if one is born into one community but is converted to the values and ideals of another? The obvious example is of a religious conversion, but there are "secular" analogues. The Chinese atheist who wants to become more "Western" in his consumption habits and familiarity with technology and mass culture is not the same as the Latin-rite Catholic who wants to learn more about his religious patrimony.  Or how about Californians who reject the life of the Uhmerican megapolis and yearn for something more agrarian? The Latin-rite Chinese Catholic at least has his local parish which is also a part of the Latin rite. Is the Californian who is doing his own thing apart from others really living a tradition, even if he is doing it with his family? Invariably the ugly duckling will want to be with his own kind. Learning a tradition is not the same as following or sharing it, and I don't think families can function as islands of civilization in the long run--the psychological cost is too high for that sort of social isolation. For Catholics, some Ghettoization (or some form of "tribalism") will have to occur to some degree, because the laity are not called to evangelize to non-believers all of the time.



More:
Jim Kalb, Understanding Conservatism and Tradition
wiki: traditionalist conservatism

The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right
Joseph A. Scotchie, Editor

Revolt from the Heartland: The Struggle for an Authentic Conservatism
Joseph A. Scotchie

Items of Interest, 26 October 2011

James Matthew Wilson, Catholic Teaching and Global Political Authority
Rod Dreher, The cafeteria is only closed for liberal Catholics (see the comment by Adam De Ville)
Sandro Magister, "Occupy Wall Street." The Vatican at the Barricades


Creating Rural Wealth

Harvey Ussery and Broody Hens


Why Companies Aren't Getting the Employees They Need

NPR: The Informal Economy Driving World Business

Kevin Carson, There is No Disinterested Authority and Battle for the Heart of the Occupy Movement

Peak Oil:
The peak oil crisis: the energy trap by Tom Whipple (EB)
Oil and the Economy by Chris Martenson
A recording from yesterday's conference call with Cris Martenson is now available.
Individual statements in support of ASPO-USA's letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu (EB)

A return to the age of sail? The first Transition podcast! A visit to the Tres Hombres, tasting a revolution in shipping

The Environment:
Polluted America: Amazingly colourful aerial pictures that highlight damage to Earth wrought by industry
Grist: Is the environmental crisis caused by 7 billion or the 1%

Conservative:
Thomas Fleming, The End of the American Empire and Fight Night in Vegas
Jack Hunter, I'm still holding out hope that conservatism will triumph
Daniel Larison, Paul Ryan and Social Mobility
More ignorant "We're #1!" rhetoric from a Republican.

Counterpunch:
JOHN LAFORGE, Radiation Reporting
GARETH PORTER AND SHAH NOORI, U.N. Tally Excluded Most Afghan Civilian Deaths in Night Raids


NPR: Reporting from the front lines of Mexico's drug war

TAC hiring online editor
I find myself tempted by this...

Catholic:
Solemn Dominican Rite, Blackfriars, Oxford
Fr Thomas Kocik's Talk at Thomas More College
Further from the Association of Latin Liturgy and the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham
Pulling an all-nighter: The example of St. Dominic

Chant - Amor et Passio: Interview mit David Ianni


Anthony Esolen at Christendom College: Author Anthony Esolen Exposes Society's Misunderstanding of Love - his lecture can be downloaded at iTunes.

Music:
Heinrich Isaac, the film (full version)

Maine Song and Story Map
Bluegrass Diva with Steve Martin, Ed Helms and Noam Pikelny
Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers will be at Villa Montalvo tomorrow.


Yo-Yo Ma on The Tonight Show

In the Footsteps of a Hero: The Joseph Brennan Story

Immigration

Vox Populi: If you have to ask, you aren't
Alte: The rules of migration
James Matthew Wilson: Citizenship, Localism, and Catholicism

Right communitarianism

Good discussion for this piece by James Matthew Wilson: Libertarian Solutions to Communal Difficulties.

"Minding your own business."

I've written on TFP before, but here is a piece by James Matthew Wilson on an incident at a recent demonstration ("rally") by TFP: Deracinated Meritocrats and the Marriage “Debate”. Setting aside the issue of the actions of those who were counter-protesting, I think it is a good illustration of what Dr. Fleming points at the problems of Christian or Catholic political/social movements. First, it is very questionable whether such actions in themselves are effective at converting hearts. Then there is an added note of triumphalism in the attitude of TFP, with their banners, sashes, and other paraphanalia, which probably creates a further obstacle to conversion. I do not believe that all have the gift to preach to strangers, and we should be evangelizing our neighbors, with whom we have some sort of connection. How can there be a change in laws if the competing principles differ so greatly and they cannot be changed in the other party without moral conversion?

The non-Christian plan of action

Recession — An opportunity we should not pass up
by Peter Seidel (original)

To reach sustainability we must bring our economy back to reality. Doing so will require us to decrease human population, take money out of politics, return governments to the people, and free the media from concentrated ownership and corporate control. We need to reorient our goals and values. If the public ceased to admire conspicuous consumption and lavish living, and openly recognized the damage associated with such lifestyles, we could do away with harmful overconsumption and develop lifestyles that are healthy from both an environmental and economic perspective.

Traditional American conservatives and Christians would probably agree with all of those goals except population control. (Some might be skeptical about the push for democracy, but it is the case that there are American conservatives who believe democracy is ideal for Americans, if not for everyone.)

Something from James Matthew Wilson: The Population Bomb.

Plus: Adam K. Webb, Class and Clerisy

James Matthew Wilson, Personality, Conversion, and Being: On John Paul II’s “Fides et Ratio”

Christians have faith in God not chiefly as a first cause or unmoved mover, nor primarily as the ground of being in whom we move and who “moves” in us; while it is valid to name God as Goodness Itself, Beauty Itself, Truth Itself, and Being Itself, the Christian above all knows Him as Personality or Personhood Itself. He is a personal God not simply because he has a knowledge of individuals; that is, we call Him personal not merely as a means of contra-distinguishing Him from the mechanical Deist god of general rather than particular laws. But rather, because what He reveals about himself above all is His reality as the archetype, as it were, of Personality; as Three Persons in One Nature, the Trinity speaks to us of the intimacy of love, the philia between persons, as the fundamental principle of things. Love in this sense precedes being, and a person is one who loves another with a precision, complexity, and totality the full description of which it is beyond my ambitions here to provide. Our self-knowledge as persons is preceded by and modeled on the Persons of the Trinity; it is in this participation in the Divine Persons that our human dignity resides. While modern discourse often uses the terms “personal” and “subjective” to relegate something to the private sphere, to neutralize its authority or attenuate its reality, the Christian senses that it is precisely insofar as we are persons that we approximate to divinity. What is most personal is not most “private” but most real and most important. My “subjective” ideas possess a dignity, authority, and reality that makes the mere “objective” seem lifeless in comparison.

As such, God as the Person who gives of Himself without reducing Himself, and so makes things to be that had not been; Who loves what had not previously been there to be loved (and Who makes the “there” there–place–as itself lovable): He sets all things in being not of necessity but by grace, by the utter gratuity of caritas. This mystery of grace and creation, which Benedict XVI has elsewhere and powerfully described in terms of freedom, love, and reason, precedes everything–everything, that is, save God as Trinity, as a Perfect Community of Persons in One Nature. In the Trinity, grace and personality are perfectly one. As St. Thomas Aquinas underscored, this entails that God, as Personality Itself, is outside any species or genus: He is not a person like us, though we are persons insofar as we bear a likeness to Him. As such, there is no ground besides, outside of, or Before God on which to base our discussion of Him. There is no secular terrain on which the Christian God features like a mountain and another god or gods like rivers and forests, all of whom can be summed up, compared and contrasted, as so many individuals in a ginned up science of divine geography called Theology. Personhood and grace precede all things, because by grace things come to be, and by God as Person things are eternally known, loved, and given form.

Speaking of Personality as it relates to God irks me. Mr. Wilson identifies Personality with "Personhood" -- if this is the case than "Personhood" here cannot mean the same thing as the abstraction taken from "Person" as applied to the Three Divine Persons of the Most Holy Trinity. (Otherwise we would have the absurdity that God is both One Person and Three Persons.) How would a Thomist speak of the same thing? Is it the case that the Church Fathers spoke of the Divine actions, God's love of us and so on, or of the Three Divine Persons, rather than of abstractions pertaining to the Godhead?

The Treasonous Clerk: “See, I Am Doing Something New”: John Paul II’s Summons to Secular Being, by James Matthew Wilson

The pope’s summons proves extremely daunting: he wants a philosophy attentive to metaphysics in order to reground modern theology in a concern with reality—with objective and absolute truth. But, in 1998, he finds no one (or few) in contemporary philosophy turned toward the questions of being. Who any longer treats philosophy as founded in its sapiential dimension—that is, in its drive to explore the foundational human questions all persons need answered if they are to live fully (§81)? And who endeavors to arrive at philosophy’s “genuinely metaphysical range” (§83), its concern with being, with what is real? And so Fides et Ratio makes an intervention in philosophy in hopes of building up a population of philosophers who might, someday and in turn, help to rebuild modern theology as a discipline attentive to the foundations of reality rather than merely the phenomena of history or experience. Beyond analytic and Continental philosophy, we need, as it were, a renewal of “plain old-fashioned philosophy.”
Emblem of the Papacy

Thus, the provisional nature of this encyclical. It makes insightful arguments about the history of religions and intellectual inquiry in general; it recovers a reading or narrative of history often dismissed as the alibi of an anti-modern Church; but in doing so it primarily makes the case for others to begin a new work: the rediscovery of human life as an intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage whose terrain is always what is real (being) and whose horizons are the specific historical revelation of God’s Word and the “infinite mystery” of God Himself (§14). We are asked to rediscover that the reason of “separate philosophy” leads finally to despair of reason. If, on the contrary, we recognize that reason is preceded by faith (as we experience, for instance, in the already present desire to know the truth about ourselves) and that reason is completed by faith (reason opens onto truths that, finally, surpass it and that it can see in only fragmented fashion) (§13)—we discover something grand. Reason participates in the human being’s circular journey from the gift of being and the gift of revelation toward a theological understanding of those gifts. It is man’s natural means of searching for a truth that ultimately transcends human life and reason alike and brings all searching to an end (§73).

Fr. Benedict Ashley has written that Thomism has neglected the historical dimension of being, but it is not clear to me how this can be the case if philosophy is to attain to the Aristotelian ideal of episteme and sophia. The contingent may be helpful in helping us understand natures and causes, but there cannot be a science of the contingent as such. While Pope John Paul II is correct that we are in need of metaphysics, Fr. Ashley rightly reminds those who desire to know that we must first have an adequate physics.

James Matthew Wilson, Gratuitous Foundations: Benedict XVI’s Humanism of the Gift, Part II

James Matthew Wilson, Gratuitous Foundations: Benedict XVI’s Humanism of the Gift, Part I

The Treasonous Clerk: Art and Beauty against the Politicized Aesthetic, Part VII

James Matthew Wilson - 03/09/10