Thought Diary -November 2005

Thanksgiving has come and gone, and the Internet had a little flurry of remembrance of Kenneth Deffeyes' prophecy that Thanksgiving of this year would signify the real beginning of Peak Oil. Whether or not Deffeyes' prophecy is correct, the USA is still slouching to Bethlehem to be born or maybe Gomorrah to bury itself, and life goes on.

I want to use this opportunity to thank my little core of readers for their supportive presence. I just heard from another reader this past weekend. He had seen my article "Concerning Jay Hanson and dieoff.com," which he liked, and he also shared that he was a late convert to Catholicism. The unique configuration of this website appealed to him. The Peak Oil focus appeals to one set of readers, the meditations on Catholicism appeals to another, but rarely do those circles intersect. But it is my basic, though perhaps inchoate sense, that the profligacy and irresponsibility represented by Peak Oil somehow fundamentally returns to a religious question or to historical decisions, turnings, developments, about religion.

Evelyn Waugh once wrote that "It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural thesis upon which it rests." But of course it is possible and people do it all the time. That is why we have, in the modern age, a world, an ethos, characterized by intellectual tyranny - which is the default position of people who have learned how to think to the extent of freeing their imagination from one sort of dependence without noticing how they are lodging it in another. Intellectuals, in other words, are people who are dependent upon fashion rather than dogma or religious teaching. But the problem is that while dogma or religious teaching may not always be an effective barrier against pride, the world of fashion doesn't even cognize the problem and in fact thrives on it. So: in this devolution, I somehow see Peak Oil as Pride: the hyper-gigantism of pride translated into economics. Certainly - a minority point of view!

But I found recently a sort of support for my minority view in the wise words of the late historian Herbert Butterfield, from his book Christianity and History: "...A civilization may be wrecked without any spectacular crimes or criminals but by constant petty breaches of faith and minor complicities on the part of men generally considered very nice people...If all men had only what we consider a reasonable degree of cupidity, politics would still be driven into dialectical jams - into predicaments and dilemmas which the intellect has never mastered..."

But now we have the reality of "dialectical jams... predicaments and dilemmas..." mirroring us everywhere in the natural world as well as the human, historical and political worlds. Rivers of benzene in China, a global climate system threatened, degradation of water, soil, air; extinction of species; toxic chemicals... and so on and on. The point is that the merely natural qualities of man are not enough, have been proven to be insufficient.If acting though "self-interest" is the only morality, the day will come when human beings cannot even locate their self-interest - that in fact they will act suicidally. This day has come, and this day is Peak Oil - the meaning of Peak Oil. The clear distinction between natural and supernatural has never been more urgently needed... and never has mankind seem less disposed to understand it, or even to hear it.

As I said in my posting, the Quakers proved themselves to be Friends indeed. I am touched by how many came up to me expressing support and appreciation for my witness yesterday. And I do not mean to sound ungrateful or critical when I say that what was friendly and supportive about the Friends was also symptomatic of their weakness and ineffectuality. Because they do not feel themselves to be in possession of the truth, they would not condemn me for becoming Catholic. Rather, it is the attitude of "What works for you . . . " -- relativism -- tolerance as not mattering.

But nothing enduring can be achieved from a position of thermodynamic equilibrium. We need warmth - great fire, great passion, encompassing the need for great repentance - for the human enterprise, which is like a breath that vanishes in this universe of powerful forces only temporaily held at bay. Christianity is a little flame that keeps mankind somehow going, I mean keeps the higher light in mankind somehow going, although it (Christianity in this true sense) is grievously blown about today and maybe even on the verge of being snuffed out altogether. I hardly think that my Friends understand the consequences, what could be called the spiritual necessity for a corporate body. For people with such a heightened zeal for good works they have a strange blind spot regarding religion as corporate witness. I think this is due to their origins of Quakerism in the Reformation. It is the blind spot in all Protestantism or protestant-related thought that somehow nature, the body, the signs, etc don't really 'matter.' Catholicism fought off this Manichaean heresy in its early centuries but it has never ceased to recur because it is a fundamental heresy of man - a fundamental decision to spurn the earth on which he walks and claim spiritual purity because he has 'thoughts.' Education in sacramental life is a way of beginning to overcome this Manichaeanism -Cartesianism which so afflicts everything today.

But - I will continue to be a friend - and a Friend. My thoughts today are only a way of saying that everything in life has a front and a back. This is real life, where not even 'thoughts' may claim purity - perhaps least of all, 'thoughts.' Catholicism has its back side - its many faults - everyone knows about this! And yet, for all that, Catholicism has truth in a way that the Friends don't.The Friends have many virtues but they lack truth. And their virtues enable them to be everywhere simultaneously with sympathy and yet, in the end, with the feeling of emptiness, the feeling that they have gained nothing. When this feeling sharpens into awareness Friends reveal their best virtue: a deep respect for the spiritual quest and almost a longing for someone to tell them where to follow.

The writer who calls himself 'Spengler' on Asia Times Online has come out with an interesting piece, "Why Western Governments Fall Apart." he says, "Never have the governments of the old Atlantic alliance appeared as weak as they do today... The leaders of the West seem to somnambulate through affairs of state, oblivious to the disaster around them. In her mercy history anesthetizes those whom she intends to destroy, wrote Leon Trotsky in his History of the Russian Revolution... "

He goes on to say that "...only in Beijing and Tokyo do we find strong governments in powerful nations..." And: "... Perhaps it is just the luck of the draw, but the odds do not favor the interpretation that all the big nations of the West had the misfortune to find themselves led by ninnies at precisely the same time..." He says that Western leaders mirror the qualities of the people that elected them. These qualities are:

There may be a lot that Spengler doesn't say, but I read this list as another confirmation of Western spiritual decadence. We all have - individuals as well as nations - a "Double" or shadow-side, which if it is not honestly confronted through intellect and dealt with preferably through repentance and valid religious practice, may tend to overwhelm the expression of self or soul. I believe that Western man's refusal to spiritualize his thinking in accordance with his Christian religious heritage is the chief reason that the 'Double' has taken over in the manner which Spengler grapically illustrates. . Whenever this happens we can expect to see the damping-down of consciousness, somnambulism, a kind of robotic action which indicates that the higher centers of man have gone into a torporous condition and that the lower centers have taken over. Instead of reason we get rationalization, instead of empathy we get sentimentality, instead of foresight we get heedlessness, instead of stewardship we get greed and opportunism.

For nearly a hundred years Anglo-American philosophy and science have been sold on the idea that positivistic materialism is the only true form of thinking, and the result is the evil, incompetence, deception, torture, lawlessness and insouciance that reigns over the West today. The latest defeat of the merest glimmer of protest against this reign of materialism was the Incident at Dover -- for which we perhaps need a new Matthew Arnold, a new 'Dover Beach' -- when the Intelligent Design movement went down in flames. The Darwinians have hitched the concept of evolution to materialism - which did not need to happen. Evolution is a fundamental idea reconciliable with spiritual facts - such as the origin and development of language, which Darwinian materialism cannot explain. But a whole raft of important spiritual facts are swept away by the Darwinian juggernaut - which has essentially become a form of materialist fanaticism. The Darwinians don't want to acknowledge the flaws and holes in Darwinian theory because they are afraid the Creationists, or now, the Intelligent Design advocates, will make hay with it. .

The Intelligent Design movement is not enough to arrest this entropic decline, but it is a sign that people are beginning to be aware that "Ideas have Consequences." One's view of how the world came to be impacts upon one's moral action and capacity for thought. Intelligent Design is an attempt to resurrect intelligence in human affairs by bringing back the concept of intelligence to the objective world, thus resisting the continuing slide into politics and subjectivism. But it's a long time-frame. How much longer will have the luxury of abiding in chaos? --

My piece, which was submitted to the Hartford Courant on Feb. 3, 1996 (but never published) was an anti-abortion op-ed that commented on a mailing by a group calling itself the Red Rose Society, of a postcard showing an aborted fetus. The action provoked the usual cries of outrage from the usual sources, one woman from Planned Parenthood calling it an "act of terrorism." My op-ed said that, on the contrary, "it is the incoherent reasoning and judicial arrogance of Roe v. Wade which has fostered terrorism and lawlessness in American society."

I went on to discuss the two major consequences of the Roe v. Wade decision. First, the role of the male (father, husband, boyfriend, etc.) was completely disregarded in the decision to elevate the woman's right to choose, and this represented "an insidious intrusion of the State into the male-female partnership."

The second major consequence, I wrote, had to do with the nature of government itself, the purpose of which is to protect the weak from the strong."This is the moral justification for government; otherwise, we might as well live in a society of predators... It was weakness itself which was declared, in principle, as being unworthy of state protection..This is Power at its ugliest: the doctrine that Might (however defined) makes Right. It is an assertion of the strong against the weak, and the right to make this assertion was what was granted by Roe v. Wade."

Well, they say that chickens come home to roost. I can't say I was surprised by the review of neocon apologist John Yoo's book, The Powers of War and Peace: The Constitution and Foreign Affairs After 9/11, reviewed by David Cole in the Nov. 17, 2005, issue of The New York Review of Books. John Yoo, apparently a low-level lawyer in the Bush Administration, rocked his way to fame and fortune in the Bush administration by telling "What Bush Wants to Hear" - the title of Cole's piece. What Bush wanted to hear, apparently, is that being President gives him the right to do anything he likes. Cole quotes from the Pentagon's national Defense Strategy of March, 2005: "Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak, using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism."

Cole comments: "The proposition that judicial processes - the very essence of the rule of law - are to be dismissed as a strategy of the weak, akin to terrorism, suggests the continuing strength of Yoo's influence. When the rule of law is seen simply as a device used by terrorists, something has gone perilously wrong."

It is the continuing shame of American liberals that they were and are unable to perceive how Roe v. Wade undermined the moral justification for law and government, and helped to launch the U.S. into its current career of international predator. And it is the shame of American 'conservatives,' supposing there are any, for not perceiving the link from the former to the latter - from abortion to torture.

Of interest lately was an op-ed, "A Separate Peace," which appeared in the Wall Street Journal on oct. 27 by Peggy Noonan, former Reagan speechwriter. She writes that the elites in the U.S. are in a state of growing awareness that "the wheels are coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks" but don't have any sense of what to do about it.She calls this sense that something has gone deeply and fundamentally wrong in the USA the "unspoken subtext" in American society. The mood of the elites is "resignation" -- having abandoned leadership, they are making their "separate peace," which comes down to the grim thought: I got mine. "You're a lobbyist or a senator or a cabinet chief, you're an editor at a paper or a green-room schmoozer, you're a doctor or a lawyer or Indian chief, and you're making your life a little fortress. That's what I think the elites are up to."

I found it highly interesting to read in Ms. Noonan 's biographical note at the end of her piece, that she is the author of John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father, due out from Penquin this month. Once again, it is the Catholic voice that is to be distinguished, in the cacophony of the present, in tones that carry something of realism and sense for the public good. There were perhaps important points that Ms. Noonan could have made, but didn't; but the fact that this piece appeared in the Wall Street Journal - that bastion of Mammonite neoconservatism - is something to note.

At the risk of repeating myself, I will say again that what has happened in this country is the results of the collapse of the Protestant hegemony. The WASPS, sensing their demographics weakening in mid-century, made the fateful decision to ally themselves with the Jews rather than the Catholics. Mike Jones writes about this in "My Big Fat Hispanic Wedding: Spanish, WASP, Jewish and Catholic California" (Culture Wars, 24:10, October 2005). There are some significant dates: 1965, when the Film Production Code was broken, thus ending "31 years of Catholic hegemony in Hollywood." The way was open for Jewish domination of the entertainment industry. 1973: Roe v Wade, which according to Jewish convert Bernard Nathanson, was orchestrated by "a largely Jewish movement headquartered in New York in California." 1980: when Reagan, "invited the Jews into his administration," (according to Midge Decter.)

The record speaks for itself, and Peggy Noonan's piece is full of it-- "a sense of unreality in our courts so deep that they think they can seize grandma's house to build a strip mall; our media institutions imploding ... the fear of parents that their children will wind up disturbed, and their souls actually imperilled, by the popular culture in which we are raising them. Senators who seemed owned by someone, actually owned, by an interest group or a financial entity..."

A friend recently criticized my website for what he called tinges of anti-Semitism. I don't believe that this is true. But I would have to ask: where has it evaporated, the ability to deal with reality, the ability to think, honor, integrity, the sense for the public good, the need - if need be - for self-sacrifice, for doing what is difficult or uncomfortable or unpopular? All of these qualities have vanished from public and private life coincident with the rise to power and influence of a small minority of Jews - not of the faithful Jews, I might add, but of a minority even within this minority, for whom Judaism seems to function as a kind of ideology. Mike Jones sees the history of late 20th century America as mainly the story of Catholic defeat and Jewish triumph. For the record: there are about 62 million Catholics in the USA and about 4-5 million Jews. The vanishing Protestant legacy left behind the outlines of an old, old story. How fatuous now seem the pronouncements of 'the end of history' of a decade or two ago. On the contrary history has never seemed more relentless, and the accolades to 'capitalism' and 'democrasy' seem like slogans of a bygone superstition.

will eventually be posted his reply to my reply (received today) and the original Thought Diary posting the sparked the exchange. Certainly the continuation of dialogue and argument is perhaps the one means to rescue my poor Thought Diary postings from the total oblivion of the Archives to which they are consigned at the end of every month or two.

"...You are full of interesting ideas. I never thought of declining Protestants as allying themselves with Jews, but the idea makes sense. Think about our own situation in B'ham in the 1950s and early 60s. Jews were part of our world --- PJ's friend Abe Berkowitz, for example, and many others, but I can think of no Catholic who was in any way part of our world. There was one Catholic family that Isabelle knew and liked--- but they[were] significant as people, not as Catholics.

Anyway, all very interesting. I can see why you may be getting a bit of feedback that maybe you are tinged with "anti-Semitism." You know, when Joe Sobran disappeared from the National Review, some writer (I can't remember who it was) started wondering what happened to him, and asked somebody at National Review in a position to know. The answer that came back was that Joe had gotten the "Jew thing."

It is possible to get the "Jew thing," and it may not be a good thing to get. I like the distinction you make between faithful Jews, and non-religious Jews ---- so many of whom bring a great deal of energy and IQ to some terrible causes --- communism, neo-conism , etc. etc.

I would like to remind my readers that a society purged of all consideration of race, religion, ethnicity, and prejudice has never existed on this earth and probably never will exist. The issue of importance, it seems to me, is not the state of one's inner feelings regarding Jews, blacks, white males, homosexuals, or any other group, but the strength of one's commitment to the rule of law and its procedural protections. The strength of the law is in its limits -- in its application to situations we may not like and people we may not approve of. The existence of prejudice does not mean that injustice will necessarily follow. What guarantees injustice is the violation of procedure -- the imposition of personal or political goals in place of the plodding safeguards of the law. I am reminded in this regard of St. Thomas More - in the movie The Man for All Seasons - who said he would even grant procedural protections to the Devil - because what would happen if you removed all the safeguards of the law and the Devil turned against you? What would protect you then?

The template and archetype of all procedure is the act of consecration, religious ritual. I believe that human beings have a need for religious ritual, and that when this need is frustrated, particular problems and perversions arise in society over and above the normal problems and perversions of mankind consequent upon the Fall of Man. Thus there is Normal Fallen Man but beyond this there is Abnormal Fallen Man. Normal Fallen Man may do all sorts of very bad things, but there nevertheless remains an area apart from himself which is simultaneously and paradoxically both intimate and objective. That area - symbolized or incarnated by the enactment of valid religious ritual, enables the feeling of communion by removing the act of communion from anything having directly to do with individual acts or feelings. Normal Fallen Man is at least bonded with others in some sense, and he has some access to that inner distance in which he may - should he choose - acknowledge his own prejudices and subject himself to correction - by thought or experience. It is this little distance, supported in Western society by Christian ritual, which has fostered the growth of political freedom, the rule of law, and science.

Abnormal Fallen Man, on the other hand, lives in an abrogated distance. This is what is meant by the phrase, "to immanentize the eschaton," which used to be popular in conservative circles prior to the hijacking of conservatism by the neocons. In other words, it is to collapse the Eschaton, the Last Things, the transcendent reality, into aspects of the self. What the old conservatives missed in this phrase is the fact that the Eschaton is not just the "distant," 'the objective," etc. but it is also most inward and intimate. Eschatology is nothing if not access to the world of thoughts, the intimacy of thought, the corrections and discipline of thought.Thus Abnormal Fallen Man, lacking intimacy, because lacking access to the objective, attempts to gain intimacy by imposing corrections of thought upon others. He becomes the Political Corrector - a person for whom thoughts have become, in a way, abhorrent - a form of "harassment." Thus it becomes impossible to say anything about anybody, to make any distinctions whatsoever. The act of thinking itself has become subversive.

That these tendencies exist in our modern society George Orwell knew only too well. Orwell diagnosed these secular tendencies but did not connect them with the practice of religion. He did not realize that valid religious practice, whatever else it may do, or fail to do, is the first line of defense against the suffocation of man - his reversion to alien status with respect to the world of his own thoughts.

November 6, 2005: Follow-up correspondence re discussion of Karmo v. Johnston posted to Sword of the Mouth website. Nov. 7: Additional correspondence posted on topic today on the alternate website. Ongoing reflections about the Judahites, or Jews, are posted below. New postings, whenever I get to a different subject, will be posted at the top of the page as is my usual custom.

The Blessing of Jacob
November 7, 2005
Judah, the fourth son of Jacob, inherited the mantle of his father, the patriarch Jacob named Israel. As Jacob lay dying he pronounced these words to Judah:

"Judah is a lion's whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he couched up as a lion, and as an old lion: who shall rouse him up? The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come; and unto him shall the gathering of the people be." (King James version, Gen. 49:9-10) The Revised Standard Version translates the important passage: "The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler's staff from between his feet, until he comes to whom it belongs..." to which is appended the note: in Hebrew, until Shiloh comes, or until he comes to Shiloh. From the Catholic Bible (Douay-Rheims) the critical passage: "The sceptre shall not be taken away from Juda, nor a ruler from his thigh, till he comes that is to be sent, and he shall be the expectation of nations."

"Shiloh" is the place of the tabernacle, and in my Scofield edition of the KJ version, the note reads that "Shiloh" is to be taken as a figure for Christ. (The Scofield Reference Bible is a highly problematic text, which is not to be recommended for other reasons, but it does have a useful cross-referencing system.)

It seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that the theocratic kingship of the Jews was known by the Jews themselves as a fact of validity only until the time came for the "one to be sent," Shiloh. To study this problem - that is, the validity of the Old Covenant after Christianity - involves one in the deepest questions of human history and events so bound up with the soul that the normal distinctions between 'facts' and 'values,' or 'literal' vs. 'symbolical,' no longer hold. To venture upon this lonely promontory is to realize that human history is a fragile plank erected upon a great churning sea of spiritual unknowns. And yet it remains important today - critically and crucially political, because claims for the validity of this Old Covenant have been used to justify Israel's claims, not to mention America's support for those claims.

Avery Cardinal Dulles wrote a not-so-incisive piece, in my opinion, on "The Covenant with Israel," in First Things (Nov. 2005). His article does at least highlight some of the intellectual problems consequent upon Paul's Epistle to the Romans, where he writes: "Brethren, my heart's desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved. For I bear them record that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For they being ignorant of God's righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God..." (Romans 10: 1 et seq) But Cardinal Dulles does at least acknowledge that "Jews and Christians have honest differences about this point [which] is a powerful incentive for dialogue between them."

I agree that there might be honest differences, but I have yet to remain convinced that dialogue is the answer. Just recently, an article appeared in the Jerusalem paper, Ha'aretz: ADL's Foxman warns of efforts to 'Christianize America' By Shlomo Shamir, Haaretz Correspondent NEW YORK - Institutionalized Christianity in the U.S. has grown so extremist that it poses a tangible danger to the principle of separation of church and state and threatens to undermine the
religious tolerance that characterizes the country, the national director of the
Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, warned in his address to the League's national commission, meeting in New York City over the weekend...

To call this hypocrisy is an understatement, when, despite two thousand years of Western history, Israel has not even discovered the principle of the separation of church and state. How much longer will Americans let the Jews get away with this sort of thing??