Anti-War

The Anti-War Movement:

We have long known that the core of the anti-war movement was naive college students who haven't yet learned how reality works, led by a very few hard-core radicals. Some of these radicals are good people, like the Quaker groups, which are mostly made up of northeastern mothers who just hate the idea of violence. Some are terrible, like the Stalinist group ANSWER, which serves as an apologist for states like the DPRK. Regardless of which, however, there are very few people genuinely committed to the movement. There aren't many Stalinists because the ideology has been slowly exposed as the totalitarian evil that it is. There aren't many Quakers for the reasons explored by the excellent John Wayne film Angel & the Badman (currently available on Hulu, by the way).

The use of the movement by the broader left during the Bush administration made it seem larger than it ever really was. A new video clarifies just how great the falloff has been since the election of a left-wing president. The temporary swell wasn't made up of committed anti-warriors at all. It was made up of some combination of Democratic party partisans, and people who kind of thought the 1960s were cool and were sorry they had missed it. Wouldn't it be fun to go out and protest a war, man?

This is too bad, because the anti-war movement -- at least that good-hearted part of it -- really does serve an important function.

An American-led military unit pulverized an Afghan village in Kandahar’s Arghandab River Valley in October, after it became overrun with Taliban insurgents. It’s hard to understand how turning an entire village into dust fits into America’s counterinsurgency strategy — which supposedly prizes the local people’s loyalty above all else.

The pictures are, and ought to be, stunning. It is surely an object lesson on why it is a bad idea to get crosswise with a Field Artillery unit. Perhaps it is also a lesson on the limits of asking an artillery unit to function as a counterinsurgency unit, although such units have functioned very well in Iraq and elsewhere. This response is not out of character for a redleg unit, that is to say; but that is not to say that they haven't operated with restraint up to this point.

Now, I'm not suggesting that the unit in question did anything wrong. The commander will have been advised by a lawyer on his staff; clearly the action was passed for approval all the way up to General Petraeus, given the presence of his biographer in the pre-planned media response 'fires.' Therefore, we can assume that the action was considered by various Staff Judge Advocates and others of their kind, and found to be in accord with military law and the laws of war.

Still, it is the proper function of the anti-war movement -- the good hearted, loyal opposition sort -- to insist on that explanation being made plainly and loudly. This kind of action has to be justified on pretty demanding grounds, including St. Thomas Aquinas' doctrine of double effect.

The 1-320th is clearly doing at least some of the right things from a COIN standpoint, such as holding shuras with the popular leadership to arrange for compensation and rebuilding. That said:

Flynn has held “reconstruction shuras” with the villagers and begun compensating villagers for their property losses, but so far the reconstruction has barely begun, three months after the destruction.

“Sure they are pissed about the loss of their mud huts,” Broadwell wrote on Facebook, “but that is why the BUILD story is important here.”

Broadwell writes that the operation is ultimately a success, quoting Flynn as saying “As of today, more of the local population talks to us and the government than talk to the Taliban.” That appears to be good enough for higher command. Petraeus, having visited the village and allowing Flynn to personally approve reconstruction projects worth up to $1 million, told his commanders in the south to “take a similar approach to what 1-320th was doing on a grander scale as it applies to the districts north of Arghandab.”

It is not shocking to learn that reconstruction takes more than three months in Afghanistan, given its noted logistical problems. What bothers me -- a man who has, I think it is fair to say, a warrior spirit -- is to learn that this story made no appearance whatever three months ago when it happened. (What was going on three months ago that might have drowned the story, by the way? Let's see... January, December, November.... that would put this right before the elections. Oh, right.)

That the military has the mechanisms to do the right thing I do not doubt. That it is surely going through the process I do not doubt. It is nevertheless part of the moral health of our society to have the explanations made carefully and as part of the public debate. The anti-war movement should be the ones insisting on that; but warriors have a duty to hold each other to the laws of war as well. It is, after all, the souls of our brothers that are at stake.

In demanding such an explanation I do not mean to cast doubt upon the military officers who serve as their lawyers, or even the ones who serve as their chaplains. It is simply a duty that we have to perform.

A Hero

A Hero in Germany:

I mentioned below that I was reading Eichmann in Jerusalem earlier this week. One of the issues raised by the book is nonviolent resistance to the Nazis' plans for extermination of the Jews in occupied Europe, which author Hannah Arendt showed to be more common than is often realized, and generally effective where practiced. She is particularly clear in her praise of the Danish people.

Of course, given time, it is quite likely that the Nazis would have overcome these obstacles. There was likewise the necessity of physical force to stop the Nazi regime. One of the attempts famously came from the German military itself. Arendt is somewhat dismissive of it.

What had sparked their opposition had been not the Jewish question but the fact that Hitler was preparing war, and the endless conflicts and crises of conscience under which they labored hinged almost exclusively on the problem of high treason and the violation of their loyalty oath.... To the last, their greatest concern was how it would be possible to prevent chaos and to ward off the danger of civil war. (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 98.)

Now, these are from my perspective highly proper concerns for military men to hold in their hearts. Violation of an oath must be very carefully considered; treason is no matter for a man of honor to take lightly. The danger of a civil war is a severe one under the best of circumstances, which do not include having the Red Army advancing on your position.

Nevertheless, one can appreciate the objection that their concerns were patriotic, and not motivated by a human feeling for Jews as such. For that reason, I found this essay by Alan Wolfe both surprising and fascinating.

Bonhoeffer believed that states were necessary to secure conditions of social order. But when a state violated the prior order established by God, as the Nazis had clearly done, what should a Christian do? Bonhoeffer expressed his answer in an essay called “The Church and the Jewish Question” in 1933, which he wrote out of his disgust with the German Christians and their worship of naked power. Without Judaism, he declared, there could be no such thing as Christianity. Christians therefore had to stand in opposition to such explicitly anti-Semitic policies as the Aryan Paragraph. But Bonhoeffer went further. Christians, he continued, were under a positive duty “not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.” Any church that allied itself with an evil regime was not a church, and could not therefore speak for God. “What is at stake,” Bonhoeffer insisted, “is by no means whether our German members of congregations can still tolerate church fellowship with the Jews. It is rather the task of Christian preaching to say: here is the church, where Jew and German stand together under the Word of God; here is the proof of whether a church is still the church or not.”

The implications of Bonhoeffer’s thinking became obvious in May 1934, at the meeting that produced the famous Barmen Declaration and the birth of the Confessing Church. “If you find that we are speaking contrary to Scripture,” the Declaration proclaimed, “then do not listen to us! But if you find that we are taking our stand upon Scripture, then let no fear or temptation keep you from treading with us the path of faith and obedience to the Word of God.”

Bonhoeffer was a crucial member of the conspiracy, one who spoke openly but also worked as a secret agent for the benefit of the Jews. He is clearly someone that Arendt leaves out of her calculation that 'to the last' the conspirators were chiefly worried about worldly things.

Wolfe is somewhat bothered by this.

As admirable as Bonhoeffer’s actions were, there nonetheless remains something disturbing—we should be candid about this—in his willingness to jettison so many centuries of moral and ethical reflection on the good life and how it should be led. “Principles are only tools in the hands of God,” he wrote. “They will soon be thrown away when they are no longer useful.” But it is precisely because we recognize the fragility of ethical principles that we work to preserve and protect them when they are under attack. If all men were Bonhoeffers, ethics might be dispensable. But they are not, and so we need Kant and his successors....

I would be less than honest if I did not admit that bringing this man—and his intransigence on all the important questions of our time—so vividly to life raises awkward questions for the liberalism in which I put my own faith. How, precisely, would a Rawlsian have acted in those dark times? Must we not move beyond this-worldly conceptions of politics as a struggle for power to other-worldly concerns with repentance and days of judgment, if we are to grasp how the Nazis were able to combine their own rational plans to kill millions with satanically inspired ideas about a Thousand Year Reich, and also how some people were able to resist those plans? Is it possible to face death with courage without knowing that a better life awaits? Can one be loyal to one’s collaborators in the resistance without being loyal to some higher power? Can faith help overcome torture? Lurking behind all such questions is the major one: if the problem of evil is not one that humans can solve, have we no choice but to rely on God for help? Does Bonhoeffer’s greatness prove his rightness?

We can see the problem clearly if we return to Arendt for a moment. She was plainly a Kantian -- her final argument for the execution of Eichmann in spite of all legal difficulties pertaining to the case is essentially drawn from Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. Her final writing at the end of her life was on Kant's practical and political philosophy.

She also notes, however, that Eichmann claimed to be a Kantian.

[Eichmann] declared and with great emphasis that he had lived his whole life according to Kant's moral precepts, and especially according to a Kantian definition of duty.... "And, to the surprise of everybody, Eichmann came up with an approximately correct definition of the categorical imperative. 'I meant by my remark about Kant that the principle of my will must always be such that it can become the principle of general laws'.... Upon further questioning, he added that he had read Kant's Critique of Practical Reason.... Whatever Kant's role in the formation of 'the little man's' mentality in Germany may have been, there is not the slightest doubt that in one respect Eichmann did indeed follow Kant's precepts: a law was a law, there could be no exceptions. (Arendt, 135-7)

I'm not quoting her strident and plain objection to Eichmann's application of Kant's principles. She also noted that Eichmann himself admitted that he was failing Kant when he agreed to work on the Final Solution.

However, the Final Solution followed two previous 'solutions' -- forced emigration and concentration camps. Apparently both of these were in line with Eichmann's formulation and understanding of the categorical imperative. That's not quite as unreasonable as it sounds: the conflict in the will in 'formulating a maxim' that people be killed is that, if it were universalized, you would also be killed and thus unable to will. Since that is a logical contradiction, the maxim cannot be approved by Kant's mechanism. There's no similar contradiction in a universal maxim that people should be expelled from their homes. However uncomfortable, it doesn't stop me from willing.

This is really the problem with Kant's practical philosophy. His clear idea (which becomes much more explicit in the "Doctrine of Virtue," in his later Metaphysics of Morals) was to prove that Christian morality was capable of being generated by pure practical reason. There are good arguments that he failed to do this; in fact, there are a lot of good arguments, too many to address fairly even in sketch.

Even if he had come up with a mechanism that would let a Christian legislate for himself the principles of the faith, however, it is really a problem for the model that Eichmann could reasonably claim to be relying on it for his own earlier 'solutions.'

Probably a lot of people in Nazi Germany had read Kant: doubtless he was a point of Aryan pride if even Eichmann got around to it. Ultimately, it does not appear that his model inspired anyone to do from reason what Bonhoeffer did for God.

Maoism

Self Criticism:

(Image courtesy of Foreign Policy, whose article on Chinese humor is well worth reading on its own merits!)

An important part of Maoist practice, not obvious in Communist practice in general, is the art of self-criticism. Apparently, this practice is spreading.

Here, there is no conceivable way in which, in my judgment, her presence on the national stage can improve our discourse, help solve our problems or improve public life. But that does not forbid one from noting the great example she has shown in rearing a child with Down Syndrome, whatever his provenance, or noting her effectiveness as a demagogue, or from admiring her father's genuineness or her skill in exploiting new media. I've consistently tried to do this without undercutting my still-raw amazement that an advanced democratic society could even contemplate putting such an unstable and irresponsible person in a position of any real power.

His approach to the new civility, he says, will be "generous anger: a classically Orwellian term." The idea is "to make strong and lively points without demonization."

I noticed Mr. Yglesias doing this the other day. It's an odd conceit: 'How shall we be more civil, as our righteous leader instructs, given the evil of our opponents?'

Generous anger! It's a little weak, honestly, compared with caritas. Of course, I stand accused (by RCL) of taking a 'sadistic pleasure' in that; so perhaps I shouldn't speak to the matter.

Upgrade

Upgrade:

Walter Russel Mead has an interesting challenge that appeals to me. He is speaking of the need to move past what he calls the 'blue model' of liberalism, or 'Liberalism 4.0' and change to a 'Liberalism 5.0.'

Now, he's playing off the idea that 'liberalism' has altered its meaning several times: a very early meaning was what we now call 'classical liberalism,' which was (roughly) the ideology of the Founders. By the 'blue model' he is thinking of the FDR sort of liberalism (what is sometimes called 'reform liberalism').

Setting aside the terminology, though, there's something useful being said about the American project. After describing elements of the 'blue model' that are not optimal -- say, massive commutes to the factory; having to work in a factory -- he talks about some future improvements that we can imagine. For example, we can imagine not commuting to the factory, but working from home. Or commuting not to a central office, but to a smaller, local office.

If we can imagine that much, what else?

In my posts late last year about 5.0 liberalism I was beginning to get at the need for a new political imagination that could take us beyond the world of 4.0 liberalism and its blue social model.... It’s not just a question of bulldozing the bureaucratic structures of the 4.0 world (though in some cases bulldozers are called for).

For 4.0 liberals, who genuinely believe that the old social system was the only good way to organize society, life is full of gloom and doom. For 5.0s, this is a time of adventure, innovation and of unlimited possibility.

Adventure is my trade, of course, so I'm pleased to hear the call. We're talking about a movement away from the FDR-type of systems; and what shall replace them?

We might start by asking what kind of life we want. If we object to the trekking to factories, and working in factories, what do we want to do? And who shall work in the factories? Not only robots! This was a problem that Marx had to wrestle with, even, for he believed that capitalist systems were necessary to produce the wealth that could inspire a revolution. Thus, even when the revolution came, someone was still going to have to turn up at the factories -- everyone takes a shift, so that everyone can also have a shift at literary criticism, or politics, or philosophy?

Well, let's start with the last question, because it's the easiest one. Most visions of the good life include the liberal arts, the humanities. They are pursuits of the True and the Beautiful, as we often say. Good. This requires study, and study is expensive. Therefore, we shall have to make study less expensive.

Public education is already "free." Shall we expand the model to, say, graduate school?

It is clear that we cannot do so. Indeed, it is not clear that we can afford to continue with free education to the high school level, if it is to be governed by teachers' unions and mandatory benefits that must be paid before the state budget can proceed to new expenses.

That seems like a problem out of the gate. But we already have (so we have heard) a glut of Ph.D.'s. They are outside of the system, and therefore have no stake in it -- they can be used, and would probably love to find work in their field.

An easy answer should lie here. What is it, friends?

Bankruptcy for States?

Bankruptcy for States?

This WSJ article proposes an amendment to the federal bankruptcy law expressly extending to states the right (which municipalities already have) to declare bankruptcy. The idea is that several of our state governments are in such dire straits that the only other options are a chaotic default or a federal bailout, because the states' constitutions may prohibit them from making the deep cuts to public pension and bond obligations that would be required to avert a crisis.

Another option, I suppose, would be amendments to the state constitutions to give them the power to do what they need to do. That would have the advantage of not requiring the federal government to interfere in the state's duty to clean up their own houses. If it seems unrealistic to expect a state's leaders to take such a drastic step regarding its own constitution, what makes us think it's realistic to expect a state to take the step of declaring bankruptcy under a new law? One commenter to the piece pointed out that existing bankruptcy law provides for both voluntary and involuntary bankruptcy. Under certain conditions, that is, creditors can force a company into bankruptcy against its will. A similar right might be extended to a state's voters via a referendum. These are the same voters, however, who keep electing the governors and legislators who won't face up to the need to limit the appetite of government.

Other commenters objected that a state bankruptcy would resemble the GM chapter 11 case, in which bondholders took greater hits than were strictly compatible with what we had previously understood to be settled bankruptcy law, while unions were coddled. Still others suggested that it was inconsistent to turn a cold eye on the pitiable prospect of public union retirees for whom it was too late to build up other security for their old age, unless we were willing to treat military pensioners the same way. That argument gives me pause, because my natural sympathy for the military and antipathy to public sector unions lays me open the temptation of invidious distinctions. On reflection, though, I'm not impressed. Only a few public union employees, such as police and firemen, can make any claim to special treatment as a result of having risked life and limb. The military justifiably is extended special treatment in all sorts of ways. Also, I'm not aware of any mechanism by which the military leadership extorts money from its ranks to fund lobbying efforts to increase military benefits, or otherwise abuses its public position to alter public policy towards its own members.

Finally, a number of commenters expressed a wish to force the national experiment to its logical conclusion, in which the states with bloated budgets would fail and, by so doing, expose the intellectual bankruptcy of their ideologies. That's a good reason for opposing a federal bailout, but I suppose either bankruptcy or chaotic default would equally serve to expose the results of electing generations of local leaders who could neither face facts nor stand up to pressure from public sector unions.

Horse Post

A Horse Post:

RCL writes to complain that we haven't had a good horse post in too long, and he's been saving up for you. You should have said something sooner!

This first video he sends is an extraordinary example of Spanish horsemanship. Look at the collection of this hot-blooded beast, while it plays around with a rider and a lance. (Technically, the pole is called a garrocha.) And on a loose rein!



Another bullfighter. The horse is just playing with that bull. Good collection in the middle sections, but on a tighter rein.



Now, how about an Aussie cowboy?



Hat tip, I am told, to Irreverent Buckaroo.

UPDATE: By the way, did you ever wonder what a bullfight would look like if it were just for play? Behold:



The owner of this bull, and horse, is Jesus Morales -- the rider featured in the first video, above.

Both

Union:

Ross Douthat is charged by Dr. Althouse with something... she asks you to choose what.

Why does it feel like a marriage to Ross Douthat? I'll offer 2 possible answers. See if you get it right:

1. Because Sarah Palin is a woman.

2. Because Sarah Palin is a conservative.

The correct answer is #2. If Sarah Palin were a liberal, using the marriage analogy to talk about a female politician would have been recognized as too sexist.

Logically, the answer can't be #2, but "both." After all, it is the union of these categories that is the sufficient condition for his claim. She has to be both a woman and a conservative for it not to 'be recognized as too sexist' to make the analogy. If she were a man, it not only wouldn't be 'recognized,' it wouldn't be sexist at all: it would be perfectly fair, given the way female politicians are treated!

This, though, is something we've always known. The same rules don't apply to conservative women. The question I would ask is: Should we want them to apply? Mr. Douthat's piece is so obviously bad not because it is sexist, but because of the strength of Mrs. Palin's actual marriage. The clash between the literary analogy and the actual fact is so strong that it makes the piece absurd.

That's a strength of the lady; it's good, for her, to have the comparison raised.

Now, there's another way in which Mr. Douthat has a valuable point that is lost in the failure of his analogy: the interaction between the media and Mrs. Palin has not covered the media in glory, but neither has it always been positive for her. That is a problem if she has serious political ambitions. It is just as possible that she is serving as a stalking horse, though, while getting rich off the media's hyperventilation.

If that is her intention, the mechanism is all to the good from her perspective.

The Primera

The Primera:

We usually hear Diego Ortiz's segunda. But here is the first one:



If you've forgotten the segunda for some reason, here it is. (And of course we can all count at least as far in Spanish as the segunda from reading Louis L'amour; he used the term in its common meaning of 'second in command,' to show the degree of crossover among Spanish and American cattle ranchers in the southwest.)



You can see why the second was more famous. Still, the first should not be forgotten.

The Bold

The Bold Shall Inherit:

There is also something to be said for bulling your way through.

The Meek

The Meek Shall Inherit:

Via Cassandra, a quote from C. S. Lewis:

What, you may ask, is the relevance of this idea to the modern world? It is terribly relevant. It may or may not be practicable--the Middle Ages notoriously failed to obey it--but it is certainly practical; practical as the fact that men in a desert must find water or die.[...]

The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop.

In so doing, the Middle Ages fixed on the one hope of the world. It may or may not be possible to produce by the thousand men who combine the two sides of Launcelot's character. But if it is not possible, then all talk of any lasting happiness or dignity in human society is pure moonshine.

Due Process

Due Process:

A note from your psychologist doesn't really count as a medical diagnosis, let alone adequate due process for stripping someone of civil rights.

Two high-profile politicians today called for sweeping reforms to the nation’s mental health system that would prevent individuals deemed ill from legally purchasing firearms.

"Deemed" ill? Is that somewhat like "deem-and-pass"?

Giuliani said among the problems that led to the shooting spree, which left six dead and 19 injured, is the nation’s “inability to deal with mental illness.” He urged policy “adjustments” that balance things like an individual’s constitutional right to own firearms with keeping guns out of the hands of unstable people.

Better: but just how do we balance these issues? What is the due process that could work here? The diagnosis process, as I understand it, is largely an Occam's razor process -- that is, you look at reported symptoms and determine what is most likely. There's no lab test. No one can be sure the diagnosis is right.

There's also no meaningful appeal. Presumably, since the diagnosis has no force, you could simply get a second opinion. However, why would anyone give you one? They can't be any more certain of their diagnosis than the original doctor. That puts them in particular legal jeopardy if they give you the 'all clear': if they say you're good and they're wrong, they are personally liable for the harm you do. If they concur, or give a report that is noncommittal, they're safe. Why would they take the risk?

You might answer: "Because they believe in individual liberty." In that case, though, how can we rely on their clearance? Let us say that the ACLU were to set up a shop of psychologists who took it as their duty to clear everyone possible, in the interest of civil liberty. (Or say it was the NRA; whoever.) Now you really do need due process, to decide between the competing reports.

On what basis, though, would a court decide? Something as sentimental as the judge's personal sense of whether or not you 'seem normal'? A jury's? Shall we pursue a foundation for our fundamental liberties no more certain than that?

All of this suggests to me that we're far better off absorbing the occasional shooting -- and preparing ourselves, as individual citizens, to resist it -- than accepting this kind of restriction on basic liberty.

Yes, it's terrible. The responsibility to be prepared to stop such a thing is our own, though: it cannot reasonably be delegated to the state.

Gone

Gone

I had to help him go in the end, after all. We buried him where we're going to plant a new apple tree.

Guest

Lady Charlotte Guest:

I knew her, as you probably do as well, as the translator of the Mabinogion, which brought us the old Welsh tales of King Arthur. It turns out she was also an industrialist, first as a partner to her husband and later as a widow; and a knitter of wool comforters for the cab drivers who were, in those days, exposed to the weather. She apparently also built a shelter for them near her home, thus ensuring their comfort and her easy access to a cab if she needed one.

I Stand Corrected

I Stand Corrected:

How many spaces go after a period?

Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule. It's one of the canonical rules of the profession, in the same way that waiters know that the salad fork goes to the left of the dinner fork and fashion designers know to put men's shirt buttons on the right and women's on the left. Every major style guide—including the Modern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style—prescribes a single space after a period. (The Publications Manual of the American Psychological Association, used widely in the social sciences, allows for two spaces in draft manuscripts but recommends one space in published work.) Most ordinary people would know the one-space rule, too, if it weren't for a quirk of history. In the middle of the last century, a now-outmoded technology—the manual typewriter—invaded the American workplace.

I was of the last class of my high school to take "Typing" instead of "keyboarding" as an elective. For that cause, I was taught that two spaces were proper after every period. I'm sure every single post on Grim's Hall adheres to that rule.

Oops?

Gut old Hans

Good Old Hans:

Talhoffer, that is. National Geographic has been working on a story regarding his fightbook. They've re-enacted certain scenes from it, including the ones we've discussed here that involve women fighters taking on men in judicial combat.

The photo series is here.

Metaphysics

Metaphysics:

Via xkcd.

There is an additional comment, if you leave your mouse hanging over the original, which reads: "Eäendil will patrol the walls of night only until the sun reaches red giant stage, engulfing the Morning Star on his brow. Light and high beauty are passing things as well."

This is why physics is incomplete without metaphysics. Physics tells you what the rules are; metaphysics is the study of why the rules are as they are. Without philosophy, therefore, physics doesn't understand its own lessons.

Consider this, which suggests that the universe has gone through multiple big-bang events, dying and being reborn. Yet each time, there is less entropy. That is to say, in every subsequent rebirth, there is less chaos and more order.

That's sort of interesting, if you're a physicist. If you're a philosopher, it's hard not to think of the Timaeus.

The universe, he proposes, is the product of rational, purposive, and beneficent agency. It is the handiwork of a divine Craftsman (“Demiurge,” dêmiourgos, 28a6), who, imitating an unchanging and eternal model, imposes mathematical order on a preexistent chaos to generate the ordered universe (kosmos).

We could go forward and note the importance of the Timeaus to neoplatonic, Christian, Jewish and Islamic thinking; we could explore the question of which of these models is most promising. It might be enough, for an internet comment, to note it in Plato: and ask the question, "If this is the rule -- that there is more order and less chaos, on a cosmic scale and across the lives of universes -- why is this the rule?"

It may not be a passing thing at all.

Scott Roots Chivalry Marriage

Sir Walter Scott on the Roots of Chivalry's Attitude to Women:

One of the less-well-read works of Scott's is his long-form essay on chivalry. There are reasons why it is not as well read as his books. For one thing, you can learn more about his actual attitude toward the thing by reading his books. In the essay he is careful to criticize, as a scholar should, but the evenhandedness of the essay often gives the impression that there is just as much to be said in blame as in praise. That clearly was not his real sentiment, as his books show us so plainly.

You will also learn more to his credit from the books than from the essay. In his books he is usually generous even to his villains, with only a few of them being without redeeming qualities. In the essay he is more clearly prejudiced, in the just the way one would expect a Scottish Tory of his age to be: for example against the Spanish (who are 'Oriental' in character, he says, and better at feeling than thinking) and Catholics generally (the faith is lowered in quality by superstition, such as reverence for saints and the Virgin Mary).

Nevertheless, it's an interesting essay for those of you who might have time to spend on it. One particular passage that struck me was his writings on how the Germanic nations had a kind of proto-chivalry toward women in their attitude toward polygamy and chastity.

[T]he opinion that it was dishonorable to hold sexual intercourse until the twentieth year was attained... must have contributed greatly to place their females in that dignified and respectable rank which they held in society. Nothing tends so much to blunt the feelings, to harden the heart, and to destroy the imagination as the worship of the Vagus Venus in early youth. Wherever women have been considered as the early, willing, and accomodating slaves of the voluptuousness of the other sex, their character has become degraded, and they have sunk into domestic drudges and bondswomen among the poor -- the captives of a harem among the more wealthy....

Hence polygamy, and all its brutalizing consequences, which were happily unknown among our Gothic ancestors. The virtuous and manly restraints imposed upon their youth were highly calculated to exalt the character of both sexes, and especially to raise the females in their own eyes and those of their lovers.

Scott is relying on Tacitus here. I think it is fair to say that he is slightly overstating the case on polygamy, as we will see; but if anything he understates Tacitus' remarks on the exaltation of women in Germanic marriage. Compared with the Roman or the Greek conception, the barbarians are much closer to our own view about the relationship between husband and wife.

Almost alone among barbarians they are content with one wife, except a very few among them, and these not from sensuality, but because their noble birth procures for them many offers of alliance. The wife does not bring a dower to the husband, but the husband to the wife. The parents and relatives are present, and pass judgment on the marriage-gifts, gifts not meant to suit a woman's taste, nor such as a bride would deck herself with, but oxen, a caparisoned steed, a shield, a lance, and a sword. With these presents the wife is espoused, and she herself in her turn brings her husband a gift of arms. This they count their strongest bond of union, these their sacred mysteries, these their gods of marriage. Lest the woman should think herself to stand apart from aspirations after noble deeds and from the perils of war, she is reminded by the ceremony which inaugurates marriage that she is her husband's partner in toil and danger, destined to suffer and to dare with him alike both in in war. The yoked oxen, the harnessed steed, the gift of arms proclaim this fact.

Lars Walker has occasionally written against the proposition that Tacitus put forward; rather than excerpt his argument, I'll let him forward it himself. Tacitus is clearly writing with influencing his Roman audience in mind, more than he is trying to present a perfectly accurate picture.

There's a lot here that is highly relevant to many discussions we are having about our own society today. I'll stop with this, for now, and see what you think.

Good Post

Mr. Brooks on Civility:

In all the recent fulminating about civility, I haven't seen anything of worth until today. Mr. Brooks' column is a good one.

Civility is a tree with deep roots, and without the roots, it can’t last. So what are those roots? They are failure, sin, weakness and ignorance.

Civility on this model is an expression of humility; and that is surely part of the answer. There is surely a positive quality to it as well. It isn't just that we recognize our own weakness, and are kind to others who are as weak (or weaker).

However, we also know that bullies are very often people who are keenly aware of their personal weakness. Their violence against others is also a reaction to that awareness, just as much a response to this dynamic as the civility Mr. Brooks advocates. It is also directed against those as weak, or weaker, than themselves.

What causes us to get the one and not the other? More and more I feel inclined to pose these questions rather than answer them: I already know what I think about it, after all. What do you think?

Congress Doesn't Care

Congress Doesn't Care:

How well do you know the Constitution? Presumably, most of you will join me in scoring 100% on this embarrassingly easy test. But:

When the Republican House leadership decided to start the 112th Congress with a reading of the U.S. Constitution, the decision raised complaints in some quarters that it was little more than a political stunt. The New York Times even called it a "presumptuous and self-righteous act."

That might be true, if you could be sure that elected officials actually know something about the Constitution. But it turns out that many don't.... those elected officials who took the test scored an average 5 percentage points lower than the national average (49 percent vs. 54 percent), with ordinary citizens outscoring these elected officials on each constitutional question.

Thus the TEA Party's focus on the importance of the Constitution. The sense driving that focus has been that the government simply doesn't care to abide by the limits -- or to fulfill inconvenient responsibilities, such as actually declaring war when they want to fight a war, or actually amending the Constitution to seek new authority instead of pretending that they already have the authority they want.

Turns out, it's not that they don't care about the limits. It's that they are ignorant of the limits. There is no excuse for that, given the brevity of the document and its wide availability. In a just world, every Congressman who failed to achieve at least 80% on that test would be subject to automatic recall proceedings, and replaced with someone more fit for the office.

Arts & Sciences

Arts & Sciences:

The interaction between the arts and the sciences is sometimes noteworthy:

It was Galileo who conclusively swept away the idea that the sun revolved around the Earth, who dismantled the looming edifice of Aristotelian physics. Unlike others of the age, the Italian steadfastly refused to hammer the square pegs of discovery into the round holes of conventional wisdom. Through an unremitting dedication to observation and experiment, it was he who ushered in the age of modern science.

Given his devotion to empirical fact, it seems odd to think that Galileo’s most important ideas might have their roots not in the real world, but in a fictional one. But... one of Galileo’s crucial contributions to physics came from measuring the hell of Dante’s Inferno. Or rather, from disproving its measurements.

The description of the debates about the Inferno among Italian thinkers of the 14th century is highly amusing, but one wonders if they have any equals today. Though I have never been involved with one, I know that there are people making all sorts of virtual-world video games: do any of them have anything like the knowledge to ensure that they don't come up with impossible features? Do they care, as Galileo manifestly did care, that the rules of physics hold?

I agree with the final claim of the article, which is that such play may be highly valuable in just the way that Galileo's play bears a resemblance to the wilder play of quantum physics. "The world’s first true scientist, the professor tells us, understood that it takes a man of reason to provide the proof, but only a fantasist can truly reimagine the universe."

That's one thing we are being called to do now. We'll be well served by the man who can do it.