shouting matches

It is no particularly great insight that ideological labels have become mere shouting terms in our discourse, used mainly to rally the fellows and offend the barbarians. However, generally those making the observation assume that there really can and should be coherent ideological labels and––if they existed––they would be a good and healthy thing for the nation.

A recent comment thread on The Ochlophobist got me considering this assumption, however. In theory, the majority (and to my knowledge, all) of the participants in that go around are Orthodox Christians, or at least highly sympathetic to Orthodox Christianity. As such, there should be much closeness on knowledge of moral ends and images of healthy culture, etc. if not actual identity with a common set of aspirations. As such, the ideologies of Marxism or Liberalism in particular should hardly enter into the discussions, even if arguments appropriated from either lineage did, but rather diagnoses, hopes or even policies (on which there can be disagreement without the scepter of our ideological labels).

However, the tone of the Ochlophobist's discourse is latched on by some commentators, while others seek to use it as an opportunity to express agreement with one ideology, or statements to rally those who oppose the ideology they are against. While I certainly agree that "No people on earth are fit to practice socialism", I don't think any people on earth are fit to practice much of anything in the way of totalizing political ideologies, even those which claim to be non-totalizing based on their love of freedom as an abstract. (It is an often problematic accident of language that we have no one word to distinguish between the liberty of the Libertarian, and the liberty of St. Paul.) In any case, order naturally arises, and the trick is to have the natural aristocracy both in their place and humble about the powers they wield. Quotes such as the above, though, simply serve to rally proponents of one ideology while annoying the proponents of the other. I certainly have done (and will almost certainly do again) this myself, but coming from the background I do, I've never been able to make myself wholly immune to partisan fervor, and won't pretend otherwise.

or, yell, for that matter

"…it is easier to shout stop! than to do it." ––Treebeard

traditionalism in the royal family

And no, it's not the good kind.

This really shouldn't be shocking (it's been out for many years that he wishes to be known as "Defender of Faith"––note the lack of a definite article––if he is ever King), but it's remarkably tone-deaf, even if he was speaking to an Islamic student group.

Occasionally (usually from Greeks, sometimes Russians), I hear Orthodox mention that Prince Charles has a spiritual father and visits Mt. Athos. Usually, I just nod about it, but sometimes they voice some secret hope that Charles is crypto-Orthodox (no one ever remembers that his father apostatized and became CoE), and then I feel a need to gently deflate said hope, but usually without any need to refer to Guénon, who the Prince is almost certainly a follower of, at least in spirit if not in conscious fact. Prince Charles has a spiritual father, and dedicates mosques, and is CoE, and so on and so forth because he believes in all that pleasant 19th-20th c. rot about the spiritual core of most (or all) religions being the same and their participation in one, grand tradition. I suppose that believers in the perennial philosophy are less annoying than other types, and relatively harmless now that their more dangerous doctrines have been carried out to their logical extreme by more popular movements, but it still isn't Tradition.

g.k. chesterton's birthday

The Myth of Arthur

O learned man who never learned to learn,
Save to deduce, by timid steps and small,
From towering smoke that fire can never burn
And from tall tales that men were never tall.
Say, have you thought what manner of man it is
Of who men say "He could strike giants down"?
Or what strong memories over time's abyss
Bore up the pomp of Camelot and the crown.
And why one banner all the background fills,
Beyond the pageants of so many spears,
And by what witchery in the western hills
A throne stands empty for a thousand years.
Who hold, unheeding this immense impact,
Immortal story for a mortal sin;
Lest human fable touch historic fact,
Chase myths like moths, and fight them with a pin.
Take comfort; rest––there needs not this ado.
You shall not be a myth, I promise you.

fideist fascists & other figments

In a rather well-done take-down of A.C. Grayling's Ideas that Matter, John Gray offers this from Grayling's work:

Later, in the entry on religion, Grayling writes:

Some religious thinkers in the nineteenth century adopted versions of fideism as a response to the advance of science, thus exempting themselves from having to put their beliefs to the same tests as scientific hypotheses standardly undergo. The most extreme fideist is the Danish writer Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), who said that faith requires a leap in the face of reason and evidence, and is all the more admirable therefore. What horrors can be justified by appeal to the authority of the non-rational, the traditional, the superstitious, the suppositious, the evidentially unsupported, and so forth, history too often bloodily teaches.

This tirade against Kierkegaard is a good example of that silliness that marks so much of Grayling’s oeuvre. The notion that irrationalist philosophers are responsible for the crimes of history smacks of Monty Python. Though Mussolini happened to praise the German egoist Max Stirner, a sharp critic of rationalism (and incidentally an atheist), this does not mean Stirner or his ilk can be blamed for the horrors of Fascism. I cannot think of a single tyrant who has cited Kierkegaard, and none of the twentieth century’s totalitarian regimes celebrated their power by erecting statues of the unhappy Danish philosopher.

I was reminded, in reading this, of the first reply to a somewhat recent post at Of Information and Belief where a similar claim was made of Kierkegaard being a thoroughgoing (in this case, "systematic") fideist.

First of all, I am very unsure that anyone who is in the business of thinking about thinking could be a thoroughgoing fideist. This is why most accusations of fideism seem to dissipate upon much scrutiny. I perhaps have met a few persons so holy as to accept anything the Church teaches with full & immediate assent, but I do not know if even they would be fideists. While Orthodoxy certainly has its share of persons who believe that faith and reason are in some fashion at odds, even most of those use reason and even think of it as a good thing, when it goes under other names or guises. Part of this disconnect has to do with the prophets of reason––like Grayling––and not any understanding of the role of reason that would have been recognized centuries ago.

With Kierkegaard in particular, what is often missed is the transitional character of the "leap to faith" and the relatively small part it plays in his work as a whole. It is difficult to call Kierkegaard a systematic-anything, much less a fideist. (I'm not, I should say, congratulating or condemning this lack of systematic thought: It is, what it is.) To sort of paraphrase Kierkegaard's own terminology elsewhere, the leap to faith is a teleological suspension of the rational, so to speak.

Many honest thinkers, and not just persons of faith, recognize this character in all thought, how our rational discourse is built on foundations that are somehow independent of it. It does not mean that there is not an exercise of reason in the construction of such foundations, but they all are fundamentally outside the tools we use to exercise "proof". I don't think that this is some sort of frightening epistemological problem, either, just a fact of human discourse. While this is outside the particular religious and psychological contexts of Kierkegaard's concept, it is still fundamentally related.

We exercise reason when choosing to assent to the teachings of the Church, not just in seeing the rationality of its dogmatic theology, but also in the evidence of history, heart and community (none of which can be submitted to symbolic analysis) in finding it reasonable to trust the wisdom of the Church and the Spirit which guides it.