If I have a favorite line or idea from Thomas Aquinas it is this one, in the first question of the Summa: Gratia non tollit naturam sed perficit*. Grace does not remove or erase nature but perfects it, brings it to completion.
While I was sitting under a willow tree down in the 100 degree heat of the San Joaquin Valley on Sunday, I was enlightened.
Nope. Just kidding. No Buddha here.
I was sitting there reading Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. He wrote about how traditional Western culture took human passion --masculine passion above all-- and sought to turn it into virtue by moderating it. An ethical task built upon a respected natural drive.
Liberal ethics, on the contrary, seeks to drive out and replace the natural passions of men --which it pathologizes and despises-- with abstract moralism. And when grief results, as it does, it blames the man rather than the defective program. And all the while it trumpets itself as humanism, when it hates the human race.
Bloom uses the always-failing state collective farm as one example. And the modern American family as another, where the father is supposed to continue his work and support for a wife and children who foreswear any allegiance to him as a man, choosing instead their own egotistical and ideological primacy against him.
The racial engineering projects of the liberal state strike me as similarly inhuman. People are suddenly required to care more for strangers --strangers they may rightly regard as hostile or dangerous-- than for their own kind and their own property and labor, even for themselves, their homeland and its ways. And when violence breaks out as a result of this anti-human lie, the state blames their human selfishness rather than its own rootless and arrogant moralism.
*Summa Theologiae, I, I, 8 ad 2.
While I was sitting under a willow tree down in the 100 degree heat of the San Joaquin Valley on Sunday, I was enlightened.
Nope. Just kidding. No Buddha here.
I was sitting there reading Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind. He wrote about how traditional Western culture took human passion --masculine passion above all-- and sought to turn it into virtue by moderating it. An ethical task built upon a respected natural drive.
Liberal ethics, on the contrary, seeks to drive out and replace the natural passions of men --which it pathologizes and despises-- with abstract moralism. And when grief results, as it does, it blames the man rather than the defective program. And all the while it trumpets itself as humanism, when it hates the human race.
Bloom uses the always-failing state collective farm as one example. And the modern American family as another, where the father is supposed to continue his work and support for a wife and children who foreswear any allegiance to him as a man, choosing instead their own egotistical and ideological primacy against him.
The racial engineering projects of the liberal state strike me as similarly inhuman. People are suddenly required to care more for strangers --strangers they may rightly regard as hostile or dangerous-- than for their own kind and their own property and labor, even for themselves, their homeland and its ways. And when violence breaks out as a result of this anti-human lie, the state blames their human selfishness rather than its own rootless and arrogant moralism.
*Summa Theologiae, I, I, 8 ad 2.
4 comments:
Isn't this problem founded by Plato and even Homer? These rogue valuators condemn'd Gods and Men and women as they really are with a view to how Gods and Men and women ought to be simply according to the pretenses of Gods and Men and women how they are to be revered, e.g. not as peevish, bogus, etc.
I mean, if one won't eagerly pay for education from a sophist simply because he is bogus and lazy and cowardly, and ultimately a guy who reveres power, where is one going to find an educator? As long as one laughs at Plato's utopian contempt for educators as they are, no particular harm is done. But if once this contempt is brought into reality, it becomes sheer hatred of the race of sophists or intellectuals.
So also the Christian interpreter of man as sinner. ... One can see how unserious this interpretation is when one considers that churches preach forgiveness for sin through faith in Jesus Christ only for minimal stuff such as masturbation, sexual brokenness or homosexual "thoughts," "selfishness" and so on -- but never for really serious wrongs such as Naziism and racism. Perhaps Jesus Christ will forgive this or that impulse of xenophobia but only if one is using all one's discretionary time and energy (if one is 'white') to attack white privilege and systems of racial valuation.
In the same way, I guess, in medieval Europe (which BTW Luther and Calvin never should have destroy'd because this or that abuse of papal power doesn't mean a richly creative culture of Celtic Christian rooted communitarian vibrantness and diversity should be destroy'd for the sake of foursquare biblicism and greed a.k.a. capitalism) sins were routinely forgiven, but the system would not tolerate or forgive programmatic atheism, say.
In no aiôn is the machinery of grace and forgiveness for really serious wrongs, but only for sins.
But in our own particular aiôn, if you're not a nazi or a racist or republican fundamentalist, you're part of the solution. (I remember reading years ago a presumably gay male Hollywood gossip columnist making this argument, viz., that (desublimators) are contributing to the common good by not being racists etc.
Along this line, we see that the re-engineerers or desublimators set in authority over us by God or the will-to-power system (Romans 13:1-3) require little or no effort form us in terms of direct help of the poor or love of our neighbour etc. It all comes down to voting for increased social spending, and equality of population groups, not of individuals, really.
Our Lord ought to have cast his parables in group terms -- e.g. not the Good Samaritan but Good Samaria, with the richly creative multi-cultural fabric of Samaritans, Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots, Essenes, Romans, Herodians, et al, all to be celebrated for their perspectives and cultural vistas and stuff. Except for racists, nazis, and creationists. ... That's a lesson we urgently need to read into the Bible in order to learn it today more than ever.
Machiavelli and Hobbes commit hatred of the human race in the opposite way. I mean, Machavelli says against Plato and Homer that »Okay yes Selfs are bad (fickle, ungrateful, cowardly, bogus, etc), but let's revalue this "Is" as fulfilment of the "Ought." Problem solved!«
Machiavelli has a certain plausibility since "loving the sinner but hating his sin" is an impossibility vis-a-vis Selfs, who have no being except in their sinning. Karmically cause and effect are one.
Hobbes adds that the few brave should heroically scurry and risk death to the utmost of their ability to make life easy and secure for Selfs as they are.
I guess only Traditionalists get it just right: we ought to be death-risking valets to Selfs as they are as if they are brave and loyal.
In terms of an aiôn subsequent to Traditionalism, we may not that in a way, then, Selfs as they are necessitate us to be brave and loyal; the effect is greater, nobler than the cause. For this we should maybe be grateful to them.
P.S. The moral urgentness of the whole voting for Good Samaritan policies in public institutions and government (anti-racist inclusion, rights for the undocumented, health care growth, etc) feels to me to totally override all 'wealth of nations' considerations.
Admittedly, it seems rather a moral fail for one to argue that in the course of one's ordinary selfish or family-focus'd economic behaviour one indirectly benefits the man beaten and rob'd and abandon'd at the side of the (outer path) roadway from Jerusalem to Jericho.
Observations by Machiavelli, Adam Smith and George Gilder on the social benefits of competent selfishness have always evoked righteous indignation in moralists; whereas the behaviour of economic ruiners our moralists always feel reassured by in their amour-propre, since bad and harmful behaviour proves the necessity and human superiority of the moralists' plans.
But the moral offensiveness of Adam Smith et al isn't so clear when it is contrasted not with energetic direct action [e.g. by conservative Christian missionaries] but with easy, lazy 'agape' by way of government programmes that one merely needs to vote for or 'call for' (as in calling for social change).
Nevertheless, there is today no traction at all for George Gilder's "Wealth and Poverty." It is as if "government programmes" have been proved to be totally effective in elevating the destitute to ordinary prosperity, and the only question is whether government has the right to do de facto socialism. Very curious.
That's good stuff there. I'm no genius, but I recognize deep truth when I see it.
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