The Harvard Delusion

           Beware the political and philosophical buffoons who masquerade as statesmen, and who fool the ignorant masses into believing them with trite phrases no more profound than “hope” and “change.”  Beware of those whom Roy Campbell, in his poetic satire “The Botanocracy” described as

         “Statesmen-philosophers with earnest souls,

            Whose lofty theories embrace the Poles

            Yet only prove their minds are full of Holes.”

         Real statesmen are not philosophers or metaphysicians.  Rather, they are persons of wisdom, educated at the feet of our ancestors.   As Charles Kingsley explained in his essay “Ancient Civilizations,” the wise do not feed on the shame of our forebears, but on their honor and glory, on great times, noble epochs, noble movements, noble deeds, and noble folk, which mental feast Kingsley also points out, is the political implementation of St. Paul’s wise injunction for us to think about whatever things are just, pure, true, lovely, and of good report (Phil. 4:8).

         Those are not the channels in which most modern political minds now move.  If Alinsky, Marx, Keynes, or the latest New York Times poll are your mentors, you are a fool.  So are those who vote for you.  When you, your voters, and your schemes are finally shipwrecked on the rocks of reality, undeception follows, at least for a moment, until human nature and the noetic effects of sin again re-assert themselves and we unlearn the lessons of history and replace them with fantasies spun out nothing more substantial than the arrogance of the so-called experts and the attendant practical hubris and self-deception that they alone can do what all others failed to do:  namely, to escape the rule of reality.  For them, somehow (we know not how) bad ideas will not yield bad consequences.

         I call it the Harvard delusion. 

        

Where Have all the Epics Gone, Long Time Passing?

       I often ask my students why the 20th century, and now the 21^st, produced no great epic poems.  I have yet to receive an answer, any answer.  After 30 years of such questioning, I suspect I never will.

       So here, in pedagogical desperation, I do what I seldom do:  I give them the answer they never gave me.  It is not my own; it comes from Russell Kirk, as does so much that explains what’s wrong with the world.

       Great literature, Kirk insists in his “English Letters in an Age of Boredom,” habitually hovers around four enduring themes:  religion, heroism, love, and human variety.

       But, he says, (1) a society, like ours, which has lost its religious convictions and its piety, denies itself the first theme.  (2) A society that denigrates true greatness denies itself the second.  Think about them what you wish, girl-smitten vampires are not heroes.  (3) A society that takes love for nothing more than carnal gratification denies itself the third.  (4) A society that conceives of humans as little more than accidental, soulless, interchangeable, cogs in a mechanistic nexus denies itself the fourth.  “The springs of the imagination thus are dried up,” Kirk pronounces truly, tragically, and finally.  In that springless desert, not even satire can flourish or long exist, for with the loss of the great themes and imagination comes the loss even of mockery.

       There, in one paragraph, is why great literature died in our hands.  We stopped believing the right things.  We stopped asking the right questions.  In our hands, the perennial issues and the perennial questions to which they gave rise all died.  We have the opposite of a Midas touch.  What we handle turns not to gold, or even to garbage, but to ghosts.

       You can expect nothing else from the culture of death.

       No cure for it can be found, save the Word of Life, which we meticulously have banned from the public square, the academy, the laboratory, and the arena.

       Wyndham Lewis, it turns out, despite his pessimism and complaints, was too optimistic.  He thought human reason might save us.  He never asked what, or Who, might save reason.

       Lewis forgot that while we human creatures are capable of reason, because of our selfish desires and unruly appetites, we are rarely ever reasonable.  Thinking is hard work; thinking rationally harder still.  We are not at all well suited, by birth or by habit, either to hard work or to thinking, much less to both.

       Kirk could have gone on, could have continued his litany of epic killers.  Had he done so, he might have included impatience, the sort bred from years spent planted squarely before a television set, years during which we acquired the habits and rhythms of sitcoms and soap operas – thereby inexorably acquiring a taste only for problems that can be raised and solved in 30 minutes minus commercials, problems like a torn prom dress or backing your dad’s car into a tree.  For us, if it can’t be handled in 22 minutes, it’s too long and too difficult.  Reduced to those shrunken dimensions, Milton’s epic panoply (or Dante’s) becomes a mere screenplay, a script, replete with artificial laugh lines, clichés, and crudities, wherein inane anatomical utterances replace eloquence and wherein scatological shock replaces beauty, truth, and goodness, things far more difficult to conceive, write, produce, and to communicate than garish, slapstick stunts and juvenile vulgarity.  For shrunken sensibilities like ours, the word “epic” means two hours of TV watching for three nights in row.  On any or all of those three nights, thinking is optional, hardly required.

       That shrunken sensibility stands behind what I hear too often from my students.  For example, while discussing Beowulf in an English literature survey course, and the fact that while sometimes you slay the monster, in the end the monster slays you, I asked Jen, a most delightful sorority girl, what monsters she faced.  She said:  “Every day, when I get up, I don’t know what clothes to wear.”

       Somewhere in the 20^th century, the scope of battle shrunk; the monsters withered; and so, apparently, did we.

Froude's Conservatism

“It was not for me to solve the problems which surrounded religion and morality.  Like my own existence, they had their roots in mystery.  I had been born into the Church of England, and the Church of England was an institution of the realm.  It had grown into its peculiar form as the law and the constitution had grown, under historical conditions and influences.  It did not pretend to perfection.  Like the law, it had its local peculiarities.  But the interpretation which it offered of the mysteries of the universe, if perhaps mistaken in some points, was the growth of generations, the product of the thoughts of men as good and wise as had ever lived.  It was immeasurably more likely to be true than the speculations of a single individual, while, as a guide of life, it would be time to ask for fuller light when one had lived up, as one never could, to the rule it offered . . . The [Roman Catholic] Church must have strangely neglected her educational duties if she has allowed a generation to grow up in England, Scotland, Germany who had broken away from her in indignation.  The snakes which had stung her had been bred in her own bosom and nourished on her own breast.”

W. H. Dunn, James Anthony Froude, (Oxford:  at the Clarendon Press, 1961) pp. 169, 170

Mommy or Daddy: Pick One --The Tragedy of Same-Sex Marriage

You might recall the awful option faced by the title character in “Sophie’s Choice:” Pick one child or the other.  It’s not a choice any mother wants to make.  No matter what she chooses, her loss is unutterable.

Nor would any child want to make the same choice in reverse:  “Mommy or Daddy, Sally.  Pick one.”

But that is the ugly position into which same-sex marriage presses children, except that the children themselves do not get to choose.  Someone else chooses for them.

No matter what you might think about same-sex marriage, we know this:  Any child raised under a same-sex union faces a tremendous loss -- either no Mommy or no Daddy.  In a union where two men or two women are involved, that’s always the outcome.

When Mommy picks a woman or Daddy picks a man as a life partner, the children always lose something enormously valuable and irreplaceable:  a mother or a father. 

That loss often has tragic consequences for a child.  If, for example, you are raised in a home with no father around, the odds that you will drop out of school, that you will take or sell drugs, that you will go to prison, that you will be very poor, and that your children will suffer the same fate you did all skyrocket.  That same cycle of hopelessness and crime follows upon the absence of a mother.

You can’t get around this enormous loss by invoking the fatuous lie captured in the title of a recent, famous children’s book, Heather has Two Mommies, simply because she does not.  Heather has but one.  The other lady is not her mommy; she is the lady Mommy has sex with.  Having sex with Mommy doesn’t make you a Mommy any more than drinking milk makes you a calf.   And if having sex with Mommy makes you a mommy, then what would Daddy be?

The point here is not remotely homophobic.  The point here is not that Mommy and her lover, or Daddy and his, are to be shunned.  The point here is that mothers and fathers are fundamentally important in the normal development of children, and therefore in the future of the nation, which depends upon the development and maturation of the next generation.  That works best when children have both a father and a mother.

Wise governments and wise citizens do well always to remember that basic fact of life, and to avoid making laws that undermine the traditional family and traditional family roles.