The Archive for Modern Age Has Been Updated

The archive. Some items of interest--

From Volume 52, Number 2 Spring 2010:
The Origins of Social Justice: Taparelli d’Azeglio
Thomas Patrick Burke
PDF

Two Treatises on the Acquisition and Use of Power
Jude P. Dougherty
PDF

Why Modern, Liberal, Pluralistic, Secularist Democracies Cannot Educate Themselves
Thaddeus J. Kozinski
PDF

Volume 52, Number 3 Summer 2010
The War of the Three Humanisms: Irving Babbitt and the Recovery of Classical Learning
Robert C. Koons
PDF

Christianity and the Cultivation of Global Citizens
Jeffrey Polet
PDF

The Liberal Arts and the Loss of Cultural Memory
R. V. Young
PDF

And Volume 51, Number 2 Spring 2009:
Divine Law and the Modern Project
Mark Shiffman
PDF

Science and the Shaping of Modernity
Jude P. Dougherty
PDF

Becoming Children of Modernity
Thaddeus J. Kozinski
PDF

The Drama of the Right in Spain
Antonio Arcones
PDF

George A. Panichas, The New Pantheons of Our Civic Social Order (Modern Age 44:3, Summer 2002)

Today an especially dramatic sign of deterioration is that of the sports scene, often referred to as “Sports Culture.” Even those who are not sports enthusiasts, or barely attuned to sports matters, are becoming aware of what is happening in the world of sports. It is, in fact, a world from which one can hardly escape, even for one day, and even in times of national crisis. On television, in periodical literature, and in the national newspapers, sports are in constant and unalleviating evidence. In educational institutions, at all levels, sports are an incontestably dominant concern and subject.

Sports celebrities become “icons” indiscriminately revered by young and old alike. The focus of our consuming attention, they ascend to a mythic status in the minds and hearts of many Americans and are transformed into heroes and even martyrs. An entire city will suddenly ex­plode in ecstasy when its victorious sports team returns, to be paraded and garlanded as new divinities of athleticism. Sports contests become panegyrical occasions for frenzy, climaxing even in pandemonium. Revels are the order of the day, when the only veneration we seem to summon is impelled by athletes of prowess.

The nature of our loyalties is repeatedly tested and measured by the extent of our acceptance of a reigning sports culture and its partic­ular ethos. This ethos has much to reveal about us as a people, both in­dividually and collectively. It tells us something about character and culture; about our principles and standards; about the inner and outer condition of our institutions and polity. In short, it tells us some­thing about the condition of American civilization as we enter the twenty‑first century.

To be sure, the forms that a super‑ athleticism takes can be anchored in effort, discipline, devotion, if not in imagination, which are admirable qualities in themselves. But when the law of measure, of moderation, is violated to the point of excess, a resultant impressionism and superficiality accrue. Unfortunately, the classical view of human existence, one that counsels order, is one that, along with the moral virtues, is now rejected in a postmodern world that glorifies imperial might in all of its passions and irrationalisms.

Increasingly sports culture also becomes a metaphor of violence as is variously demonstrated in a number of major sports. The offshoots of this orientation of violence are to be observed widely, whether in the participation of the onlooker (in the context of professional wrestling, for instance) or in actual acts of violence by players themselves and by supporters (in soccer and hockey matches). What we end up with here is a transmutation of courage and fairness in contests of strength as the heroic concept itself is turned on its head. “Overreaching glory is a ruin,” Aeschylus rightly reminds us.

How much of his critique can be applied to the high school football culture in Texas, as depicted on the show Friday Night Lights?

Cicero Bruce, The Stand of Allen Tate (from Modern Age 42:4, Fall 2000)

Clearly the South that Tate knew as a boy had been compromised. Yet up to about 1914 the people who called themselves Southerners were still rooted in the soil, rooted in their traditions, and rooted in a way of life inscribed with the permanent values and intelligible principles that had been passed down from one generation to the next. Having reconciled vice with virtue, the South knew from experience what the modern world has tried to forget: the depravity that lurks inexorably in the hearts of humankind everywhere. This knowledge, along with their cultural ties to the past, humbled the best Southerners and contributed to their conservatism. As Tate suggests in his two interpretive Civil War biographies Stonewall Jackson: The Good Soldier (1928) and Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall (1929), the refined remnant of antebellum society rarely discussed money or how much of it someone had. For this remnant the quality of a particular man was, according to the narrator of Tate’s acclaimed novel The Fathers, “bound up with his kin and the ‘places’ where he lived,” not with his income or way of earning it, and “‘Class’ consisted solely in a certain code of behavior.”11

For Tate the New South that arose after 1918 from the ashes of the Confederacy was not a reconstruction, but an obliteration. He remained convinced that what was good and right about the Old South perished along with what was mean and vile; the cure for what ailed the old order, in other words, had been in many ways worse than the disease. He maintained that while the “cynical materialism of the new order brought to the South the American standard of living . . . it also brought about a society similar to that which Matthew Arnold saw in the North in the Eighties and called vigorous and uninteresting.”12Much like the town portrayed in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” the New South that Tate oppugns in his writings joined the march of progress, and its people, tempted by dreams of avarice, willingly conformed themselves to the ways of industrialization, urbanization, and standardization—for fear that they be otherwise ridiculed like Emily Grierson, who refused to let the postal service affix a number to her mailbox.

Tate insisted that the Confederacy was defeated in and after the Civil War because the South failed “to bring out a body of doctrine setting forth its true conviction that the ends of man require more for their realization than politics.”13He encouraged his fellow Agrarians not to make the same mistake. If the Agrarians were to succeed in forwarding their cause, they had to be of a religious mind, he argued, and they had to be able to understand each other’s religion. Such an understanding, he proclaimed, “is necessary to fire the enthusiasm of a group; it is reciprocal in its action.”14What the Agrarians—or anybody else opposed to progress for the sake of progress—needed, according to Tate, was the intelligence of sacred tradition.

This was precisely what Tate thought humanism lacked. In “The Fallacy of Humanism,” his most controversial essay, which appeared in the journal Criterion about a year before the Agrarians took their stand in print, he made this judgment jarringly plain. Here he denounced the humanistic writings of Norman Foerster, Babbitt, and Paul Elmer More. He alleged that their New Humanism (or Neohumanism) denied the polarities of life, of Heaven and Hell, and disparaged the timeless myths by which man lives and organizes his literature. Furthermore, he argued that it did not possess the authority of religion from which values emerge and around which they unify themselves to form a coherent moral system. Moreover, he contended that authority for the humanists lies not in sacred tradition, but in individuals, not in unity, but in diversity. And most important, he claimed that the New Humanism could offer no consistent point of view without “the background of an objective religion, a universal scheme of reference.”15

Some of his poems.

TN Encyclopedia: JOHN ORLEY ALLEN TATE
Allen Tate's Life and Career
wiki
Fugitives and Agrarians: Photographs

The Only Answer to Modernity’s Impiety, John Attarian (from Modern Age 44:1, Winter 2002)

Actual sin is disobedience, or rebellion. And even those who are not guilty of sins against faith may nonetheless rebel against tradition, natural law, or human authority. But should we characterize modernity as being "all about rebellion: against God, against restraint, against the limits of the human condition, and even against reality itself"

Dr. Fleming on Dante's De Monarchia:

Dante de monarchia
Dante’s De Monarchia is not a work of political theory in the strictest sense but is more what we might term a work of moral theology directed towards political understanding. It shares the general aim of all his later major works, which is to show men the way out of misery and toward happiness. Two great instruments toward happiness, the Empire and the Church, had both fallen short of divine their missions. Thus his political message can only be understood in an ethical and spiritual co–ntext.

For Dante, the unity of the universe, as designed by its Creator, is a given. Man, by contrast, has a dual nature, ministered to by these two institutions, the one secular and the other spiritual. In this work, concentrating on the secular—as in the Commedia he will focus on the spiritual—he lays out a vision of universal Empire that brings peace to world. Since the end of life, in the Aristotelian/Thomistic sense, is contemplation of the good/divine, and this requires peace, only universal Empire can provide the peace that is necessary for study, prayer, and contemplation. Thus Dante’s approach to the distinct purposes of Church and Empire most be kept separate from modern anti-Christian argument—one quite alien to Dante’s mind and purpose–for the separation of Church and state. Dante is obviously thinking much of the time of Boniface VIII’s ambitious and, he would say, quite wrong-headed plan (e.g., in Unam sanctam) to make the Church supreme in the secular as well as in the spiritual realm—a notion quite alien from the spirit of Gregory I or even of Gregory VII.

And this:

Following Aristotle in the Ethics, Dante argues that man’s distinctive character is his intellect, whose function is to understand, to know. Let me summarize the argument: Peace is prerequisite for the happiness that requires contemplation (4); While there may be various agents who would promote peace, when there are multiple organs for fulfilling a function/purpose, one takes precedence and rules the others. Thus the paterfamilias rules the household.(5) Partial orders in the human race are subsumed by the greater and more inclusive power (6). Please observe that he leaves out the Eastern, more legitimate Empire from consideration. By 1300, after the devastating effects of Turkish advances and Western Crusades, the “Greeks”—as our ancestors were now calling them—could be dismissed as a failure. Empire is to kingdoms what God is to man. (7) Because of man’s nature, a supreme judge is needed. (10) The beest order in the world depends on the workings of justice, (11) and the human race is best ordered when it is most free (12) [“potissime liberum”], but the exercise of free will requires judgment (iudicium) as an arbiter between apprehension (that is understanding that something exists and can be sought) and desire. Man is most free when he is existing for his own sake rather than for another’s (say, a master’s or lord’s), thus he is most free under the Empire, because the Emperor, if he is truly emperor, rules for our sake, while other the rulers of other forms of government are crooked and self-seeking, working for the good of the king, the aristocracy, or the lower classes. Dante cites Aristotle to show that under bad governments, the good man is a bad citizen while under a good government, the good man=good citizen. Why a single universal empire? Because, that which is best is unity, just as God is a unity. (15) Concord is best. Note that as a Trinitarian, Dante must conceive of the godhead as a collaboration of three partners, and if we really understand the political reality of Thomas’s and Dante’s time, we shall not fall into the trap of imagining that Dante is an advocate for a unitary—as opposed to federative/feudal–state. The excellence of unity is shown by the fact that Christ was born when the world ready, that is, unifed under the great Augustus. (Dante would not have known, but Augustus’ Empire was a federation of autonomous city-states.) The world has gone to Hell, he says, since Roman unity was shattered.

Did the Roman Empire understand itself to be more of a federation than a unitary state under the leadership of a central authority? Or is this just how things played out in fact? (How did the Byzantine Empire understand itself and its authority?) There can be a just reaction against the unjust usurpation of power or wrong claims to authority; how much of modernity was correct in its reaction against royal absolutism and the supposed divine right of kings? And how much of it was wrong in its understanding of the origin of authority and how it is transmitted? (As well as the relationship between justice and the assigning of rulership?)

Charles Maurras, Shaper of an Age, by Thomas Molnar (Modern Age 41:4, Fall 1999)

Loyalty in the Modern World, by Andreas Kinneging

What is loyalty? What is its quintessence, its fundamental nature? What rank does loyalty have in the realm of values and virtues? How important is it to a life well lived? The question of loyalty is of considerable interest because it sheds light not noly on the nature of modern society but also on similarities and differences of today’s culture to that of the ancients. . . .

(from Modern Age, 46:1-2, Winter/Spring 2004)

From the current issue of Modern Age: Adam K. Webb, A Debate on Localism & Cosmopolitanism: Taking Back the Cosmopolis

A response by Tracey Rowland: My Home in the Cosmopolitan Anti-Liberal Menagerie

More from First Principles

The Conservative Movement in Discontinuity
Paul Gottfried (from MA 48:2, Spring 2006) - 05/23/08

The Fall 2005 issue of Modern Age included George W. Carey’s “The Future of Conservatism” that attracted my attention for several reasons. It was forcefully written and testified to Professor Carey’s accumulated knowledge of constitutional history. And though I do not agree with his hope for the Democratic Party to retake of the Congress in order to check a neoconservative Republican President, Carey is right about the “cover” for Republican-endorsed Jacobinism.

The Patriotism of a Conservative
Bruce Frohnen (from MA 48:2, Spring 2006) - 05/22/08

Perhaps the most famous quotation from the great Tory lexicographer Samuel Johnson is his offhand remark that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Yet, almost as often as this quotation is repeated, it is pointed out that Johnson did not mean by it to impugn the character of the “true” patriot. What, then, is a “true” as opposed to a “false” patriot? Such questions seem of particular importance given the contemporary atmosphere of fear and hostility arising from the war in Iraq and of perhaps greatest concern to conservatives, those most often associated with this war, and with the administration waging it. . . .

Richard Weaver and Piety Towards Nature
John R. E. Bliese (from MA 49:2, Spring 2007) - 05/21/08

The general conception now among politicians and the public seems to be that conservatives are supposed to be anti-environmentalists. But nothing could be further from the truth. As the eminent “founding father” of the contemporary conservative movement, Richard Weaver, argued: the capstone virtue we need to restore is piety, and especially piety toward nature. . . .

George A. Panichas, Aspects of Tragedy, Ancient & Modern

Aspects of Tragedy, Ancient & Modern
George A. Panichas - 05/19/08

A certain greatness, immensity, and exceptionality surrounded the tragic dimension, even as tragedy connotes something greater than immediate life. In the ancient world, the perimeters of tragic vision were established and recognized—the tragedy of Achilles, his superhuman strength and his tragic demise, teach us to understand our limits and to measure our humanity. But in the modern world, where man “has no place,” he loses his perimeters and with them the ability to comprehend his own greatness and his own sorrow. . . .

Arthur Versluis, Secession and American Federalism

Secession and American Federalism
by Arthur Versluis
Published in Modern Age, Summer 2007
posted at the Vermont Commons (not yet available at the Modern Age archive)