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In Texas, a few years ago, a man was let off for animal cruelty on a technicality. He shot, skinned, and decapitated a cat in a restaurant parking lot.
Seems like a property violation, at the very least. But Texas has an animal cruelty law, so that's what he was prosecuted under.
Unfortunately, his defense attorney was smart. And the judge and jury, dumb. The lawyer convinced a jury that the cat in question — whom the restaurant employees fed, and named "Queso" — wasn't an animal by the definition of the law.
You see, the law defined as an animal a captured or domesticated creature. The lawyer convinced the jury that the cat was a stray.
So the cat-killer was found innocent.
Whatever you may feel about animal cruelty laws — and in this case, it was evident that no torture had occurred, no matter what else had happened — this legal maneuvering was surely the wrong way to acquit the offender.
Paul Jacob, on Townhall.com, discusses this very problem (but without talking about poor, dead Queso). You don't see this kind of objection often made. So-called practical people
say that you should use whatever defense you have at your means. Don't be picky.
Well, at the constitutional level, we all have reason to be picky. And when we enter a jury box, we should remain picky.
Wirkman Virkkala | May 1, 2005 | Netizen permalink
re: philosophy
As the ethics of enmity and the ethics of amity, thus arising in each society in response to external and internal conditions respectively, have to be simultaneously entertained, there is formed an assemblage of utterly inconsistent sentiments and ideas. Its components can by no possibility be harmonized, and yet they have to be all accepted and acted upon. Every day exemplifies the resulting contradictions, and also exemplifies men's contentment under them.
When, after prayers asking for divine guidance, nearly all the bishops approve an unwarranted invasion, like that of Afghanistan, the incident passes without any expression of surprise; while, conversely, when the Bishop of Durham takes the chair at a Peace-meeting, his act is commented upon as remarkable. When, at a Diocesan Conference, a peer (Lord Cranbrook), opposing international arbitration, says he isnot quite sure that a state of peace might not be a more dangerous thing for a nation than war,the assembled priests of the religion of love make no protest; nor does any general reprobation, clerical or lay, arise when a ruler in the Church, Dr. Moorhouse, advocating a physical and moral discipline fitting the English for war, expresses a wishto make them so that they would, in fact, like the fox when fastened by the dogs, die biting,and says thatthese were moral qualities to be encouraged and increased among our people, and he believed that nothing could suffice for this but the grace of God operating in their hearts.How completely in harmony with the popular feeling, in a land covered with Christian churches and chapels, is this exhortation of the Bishop of Manchester, we see in such facts as that people eagerly read accounts of football-matches in which there is an average of a death per week; that they rush in crowds to buy newspapers which give detailed reports of a brutal prize-fight, but which pass over in a few lines the proceedings of a Peace-Congress; and that they are lavish patrons of illustrated papers, half the wood-cuts in which have for their subjects the destruction of life or the agencies for its destruction.
Thus spake Herbert Spencer, in the early 1890s. I write spake
advisedly, since he dictated the whole of his Synthetic Philosophy rather than write it down (this passage is from Inductions of Ethics, the second part of his magnum opus The Principles of Ethics).
Spencer often made much of the self-contradictions of Christians on the subject of violence. He saw how tied the churches of his day were, in general (but the established churches, in particular), to the state and its warfaring. Rising up from a dissenting tradition, Spencer rarely attacked the religious dogmas of his age in a polemical manner. But on war and peace, he did tend to let loose. There are many examples of this in his ethical writings. I chose this one almost literally at random.
Majikthise recently extolled this idea, of a Sunday sermonette. I'm following others' lead in posting like this.
Wirkman Virkkala | May 1, 2005 | Netizen permalink
| Macintosh |
One of the true joys of the Macintosh computer, from its very first model (1984!) to the computers you can buy today, was obvious the first time you turned it on, especially back in the '80s: no command line.
Now, running Panther (OS X 10.3.x), I've called up a terminal window for the first time on a Mac.
Well, maybe not quite the first time. Wasn't there a debugging window in System 7 that worked and looked an awful lot like a terminal window? And, if looks were all that mattered, I've used Mac modem tools that look like this X-version Terminal. For that matter, running SQL in FoxBase on the Mac bore some resemblance to the non-GUI world from which the Mac was ostensibly completely differentiated.
The occasion of my Terminal exposure, today, was an attempt to download NeoOffice J/1.1 Release Candidate for OS X. Previous Safari downloads, using Web links to mirror sites, had all failed. The good people at NeoOffice suggested the curl tool. So I complied.
NeoOffice/J 1.1 is downloading now. No errors. Yet.
NeoOffice isn't where young Mr. Anderson, played by Keanu Reaves, worked. Not his cubicle. Not his terminal. It is, instead, a version of OpenOffice. Still Beta, it sounds my cup of tea. Or, in this case: T. T as in Terminal.
Not the last thing I do. Merely the last thing I thought I'd do on a Mac.
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 2, 2005 | Netizen permalink
re: varese
Edgard Varèse's influence seemed negligible, at first. He was a colleague of fellow avant-garde composers Henry Cowell, Wallingford Riegger, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and that crowd. Nicolas Slonimsky, when he was still a conductor, performed his music; few others did. But since the '60s, Varèse's influence increased. You can hear echoes of Varèse in music by Joan Tower and many other contemporary composers. Freakout rocker Frank Zappa got bit by the Edgard bug early in his life, and went on to compose vast scores in the Varèsian manner, as well as his rock and jazz and unclassifiable music. And even Einojuhani Rautavaara sometimes produces passages seemingly right out of Ameríques.
Though the influence of Stravinsky is strong, in a way, the composer he most reminds me of is Olivier Messiaen.
Like Messiaen, he explored odd timbres and elaborate rhythms. Messiaen's mysticism seems outré but still human. Varèse's soundscapes are more forbidding, and strike me as the mysticism of a man devoted to a most alien god. If there be mysticism in his work, it's not the romantic mysticism of those who loved mountains (say, Hovhaness), but of the mountains themselves.
Unlike Messiaen, Varèse never produced music of dubious taste. He produced so little. Some of it doesn't interest me, but his best music is truly great.
Varèse was understandably uncomfortable with labels. He didn't like the term experimental music,
for instance:
I do not write experimental music. . . . my experimenting is done before I make my music. Afterwards it is the listener who must experiment.
Still, it is quite evident that Varèse did a great deal more experimenting before composing than most other composers.
The avant-garde in music appeared in several varieties. Schoenberg and his school moved from free atonality to the control and hyper-control allowed by serial procedures. Charles Ives showed a liberality that dwarfed all other methods, in effect promoting an open-ended post-modernism by refusing to stick to one aesthetic program. Varèse's approach was freer than serialism, but much more focused than Ivesian pluralism; it was not pluralist at all. It was his.
Of these three strains, I find the Ivesian the most congenial. But when
I think of Varèse, a line from Kierkegaard comes to mind: Purity of
heart is to will one thing.
Varèse's music doesn't seem "human" to me
at all, and the heart that produced it stony, granitic, not tender
(which is what we usually mean when we poeticize this chunk of
anatomy). But there is grandeur in his music, something unearthly that
cannot be denied. Its beauty is the pure sublime. Wholly other, and
capable of inducing (to conjure up and appropriate another theological
term) the numinous.
It is to most other music, to an extreme, what Martinu's Sixth Symphony is to the bulk of the Czech composer's neoclassical oeuvre: a great leap beyond the known world; mysterious, impressive, exciting, humbling.
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 3, 2005 | Netizen permalink | BohMartinuDisc
| reading |
I live in the boonies, far from madding crowds and the confluence of friends.
Thankfully, a few friends still visit.
Here is one, in my messy office, doing what's natural in my office: reading.
I'm proofreading a book due to come out in June. I may mention it upon publication. Most interesting book read recently: The Inductions of Ethics, by Herbert Spencer. I can assure you, my friend in the picture is not reading Spencer!
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 4, 2005 | Netizen permalink
| philosophy |
Outside my office door, as I type these words, little children run through the halls beating drums, maracas, and other percussion instruments. The curmudgeon in me can't help but savor the King James English of suffer the little children to come unto me.
Yes, suffer is about right.
But really, I don't mind. If they had been playing music that attempted a tune, I might've. But their feet and instruments seem to keep a rhythm going.
Oops. Wrote too soon. Now some kid is hollering in distress. This is what I dislike about children: wailing and crying and whining and the like. Laughter and the first attempts at music are just fine. But how quickly a child's mood changes!
This reminds me of a project I've never even properly started: The Child as Threat. The way to solve the problem of the legal status of children is to understand that children are almost de facto threats to civilization.
As I see it, the first business of politics and law is to determine who is an enemy and who is not. The liberal tradition (to which I belong) generally argues that as few people as possible should be considered enemies, and that people in general should be given the benefit of the doubt: that is, people should be regarded as non-enemies until their intentions are somehow demonstrated otherwise. Further, liberals generally understood (that is, before socialism corrupted their ideas) that friend
and neighbor
did not exhaust the idea of the opposite of an enemy. A stranger residing elsewhere, or a stranger visiting, or a stranger living next door — though it is natural in the fearful human animal to regard these people with suspicion — most are not enemies. Indeed, liberal thinkers spent a great deal of effort explaining how strangers who don't care about you can still benefit you, even when they are competitors with your business or other means of sustenance.
The utilitarian tradition added an important element: the demarcation between enemy and non-enemy should be not only forthrightly made, but rationally made. Bad reasons to regard someone as an enemy do a lot of harm to society, and those criteria that fan the flames of fearful over-reaction (such as the leap to a warfare mentality) must be identified and rooted out. This led utilitarians into some disrepute, since many of the traditional reasons for treating people as enemies were religious, racial, cultural — that is, reasons
having little to do with reason, and yet held dearly as prejudice and dogma.
But it is often remarked that much of the argument of the liberal and utilitarian traditions work best when talking of adults. Yes, adults are capable of acting responsibly. Yes, they tend to prioritize prudent decisions, and are capable of being reasoned with. They tend to have time horizons stretching days — sometimes weeks, months, and even years — beyond the present. But what of children?
Children come into the world naked and unreasoning, demanding attention with whimpers and cries. Early on, the spark of humanity is there — the recognition of a smile, the ability to entice with joy and acceptance — but lacking property, co-ordination, and reason, the newborn are nothing like the reasonable men and women that classic liberal theories seem to require.
Yes, children can grow into such beings. We hope they do. But in their infantile and extremely youthful states, they are standing threats to the social order. They are threats not in the strict sense of, say, your holding a knife to my face will be considered a threat by me. They are not threats as my words DO NOT GO THERE OR ELSE!
constitute a threat.
They are threats in that, without a special, offsetting context, they too easily fall into the categorization of enemy.
And, further, they are a burden. Few human beings wish ill of a child, especially one whose promise of productive, friendly adulthood is still in evidence. Children so easily command our sympathy. And, just as easily, a wandering child could quickly eat up our resources. And most people see such an unasked for burden as something of a threat in and of itself.
Now, to say that we shouldn't feel this way is to engage in over-reaching preaching. It's just simply the case that we do feel this way. Further, we want to feel this way; it makes us feel good about ourselves as humanitarians. But too many burdens, too many children at loose, commanding our attention and pity, and we find our sympathies diminish. And with it, we fear, our purchase on humanity. So, though when our sympathies are put into the warm heat of a crisis, human beings can often shine, we cannot expect human beings to channel every resource into every possible pitiful child that wanders into view.
So we must restrain the wandering child. We must contain the threat. How?
Socialist-minded people immediately think of the state, and of this government program or that. But that's a mighty weird leap into a known, ongoing fiasco. Not even Judge Amy Gray would prescribe this leap as first recourse.
If the child be a threat, then the parent must be threatened back. The parents, after all, bring the child into the world. It is through their actions that this likely enemy has become part of the social world, the life-world that is our concern. So, as any adult must be held accountable for his or her actions, the parent must be held accountable for the existence of the child.
In this way, the child's right to life, sustenance, and even education arises. Ignorant, unreasoning adults are a great strain on any civilization. So the parents must be held accountable. They must be deemed as obliged — they must hold it as their duty — to restrain the child, train the child, and in general prepare the child for growth into our civilization, the adult human community.
And not as an enemy, but as a potential trader, friend, neighbor, fellow citizen.
From what I can tell, it is only by clearly seeing the child as a danger to society that we can establish the child's rights and the parents' obligations. We must forthrightly understand the challenges of the young in terms of the basic political challenge, that of the enemy vs. the citizen.
Obviously, there are many issues unresolved. The relationship between parents, the institution of marriage, and a whole bevy of problems commands attention. But I hazard they can only be worked out when we frame the problems in the basic context.
And the liberal, utilitarian, libertarian emprises can then make sense, and maintain their individualist bearings, when this very real-world conflict context is addressed without blanching.
There are few things more annoying than earnest appeals to human goodness, or need, or even liberty, without returning to the fundamentals of human co-operation. Which means, face it, seeing co-operation as something possible after some basic conflicts are settled.
The hall outside my office door is now silent. The children have gone. Their caretakers have left, too. I am alone again in a very large building. And am happy.
I like children. In small doses. That's one reason I appreciate domestic institutions: they allow me to continue to enjoy children . . . because other people take care of the little creatures when they are at their whiniest and most obnoxious. Yes, folks, I support, quite passionately, the division of labor, most especially including the labor of raising children.
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 5, 2005 | Netizen permalink
| lexicography |
I'd heard great things about WordNet, the word guide that tracks meanings with synonyms as well as hypernyms
and the like. So I downloaded WordNetX, the version for OS X. I've determined that it is often helpful, but sometimes just peculiar.
How is it peculiar?
Looking up the word wanderer, its first definition was given as
A computer program that prowls the internet looking for publicly accessible reosources that can be added to a database; the database can then be searched with a search engine.
The second definition?
Someone who leads a wandering unsettled life.
Those were the nouns. Then, below that listing, were the verbs. The list did not make clear that the verb under discussion was wander, not wanderer.
With the technical definition presented first, and the root definition presented second — and some sloppiness overall — I'd say WordNet could use some work.
Still, its synonym and antonym listings are useful, as are hypernym listings (a hypernym is a word that is more generic than a given word) and hyponym listings (a hyponym is a noun that is more specific than a given word).
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 6, 2005 | Netizen permalink |
America died from a delusion that she had moral leadership.
| atheism |
Every day the wise man thanks God for His nonexistence.
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 6, 2005 | Netizen permalink |
The Laws of Multiplication,ch. XI, p. 501
| philosophy |
Herbert Spencer is the Rodney Dangerfield of philosophy. Not because he was especially funny. He wasn't. Because he gets no respect.
He's something of everyone's whipping boy. I was reading an essay from 1870, published on the American Unitarian website. The author mentions various thinkers, and discusses their thoughts. But only Spencer gets that added little snipe. Dealing with various doctrines of imperfect theism,
the author takes on the doctrine of nescience:
This is the doctrine of such writers as Hamilton, Mansel, and Herbert Spencer; the latter, a thinker much admired, but who, though an acute metaphysician, seems to us to be a poor philosopher.
And then the author goes on to misquote Spencer (translating Spencer's unknowable
conception of The Absolute
into an Unknown God
). Later the author goes on to argue against Comte, but without the general dismissal of the French writer's status as philosopher. Calvinism comes in for quite a bit of scorn, with the cornerstone dogma of eternal punishment called awful
and more injurious to the character of the Almighty than all the blasphemies of the impious,
but no particular thinker is deemed worth a put-down.
It's just Spencer. You can always dump on Spencer and get away with it.
Recently, Susan Jacoby offered to the world a fascinating study entitled Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. It's a very partisan history in that she obviously likes the figures she's writing about: Jefferson, Ingersoll, and so on. But she does have a lot of nasty things to say about Herbert Spencer. She's really quite dismissive, and in the context of the book it's almost as if she were dealing with a Nazi.
Like usual, most of what she says negatively about Spencer simply isn't true, as Roderick Long has demonstrated. It quickly becomes apparent to the well-read reader of Jacoby's otherwise delightful tome that she's barely read one word of Spencer. Long makes this quite clear.
Well, I have read quite a bit of Spencer. And I like his writings, even when I disagree. I know, a taste in metaphysics or in other domains of philosophy can seem like a taste in sweets. I like licorice; most people prefer chocolate. What more's there to say?
A lot.
It is possible actually to use arguments. I try to do that on Instead of a Blog, today, with my impromptu essay Spencer's Relative Grasp of the Absolute.
I think Spencer's doctrine of The Unknowable is untenable. But, when reading the other day, I realized that there was a lot more to be said for it than I'd previously acknowledged. How much? Well, you'll have to read my essay, and the long quoted passages from Spencer, to find out.
I do have a theory about Spencer's ignominy, though. One reason for such a mild-mannered thinker to get such vituperation cast against him may be that . . . he's too often right, and, since he disagrees with the reader, why . . . smash him. This seems especially the case coming from people like Jacoby, who obviously don't want their readers to read Spencer, lest they be swayed. There's sort of a conspiracy of negativity out there on Spencer. And it stinks of intellectual irresponsibility and wilful ignorance, if you ask me.
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 6, 2005 | Netizen permalink | BohMartinuDisc
| libertarianism |
On the Left-Libertarian email discussion group, Scott Bieser asks a question:
Is the basic knowledge that government is nothing more or less than a gang of thieves, bullies and murderers really too complicated for most people to understand?
He treats his question as rhetorical, and goes off in another interesting discussion about the Libertarian Party and its ineffectiveness.
I take Mr. Bieser's question seriously. Is it really too hard, again, to understand the radical libertarian charge against the state?
No. It's too harsh for most people to stomach.
People quickly realize that this doctrine implicates them in crimes galore. People don't like being implicated.
Go ahead. Accuse someone of a crime. Especially one they didn't think they were guilty of before you spoke.
Watch how they react.
Compare with the general population and its standard reaction to libertarian radicalism.
Mystery solved.
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 7, 2005 | Netizen permalink | eDebate
| philosophy |
I am a rationalist in at least one sense: I believe that most people ration their rationality far too drastically. Too many treat reason as if it were a scarce good, to be indulged in only rarely. Instead, reason is freely producable. The only cost is in the hunches and dogmas one gives up after thinking matters through.
I've talked with quite a few people in my life. There are few (if any) that I believe could not afford more time and effort thinking, less time in just believing
— or in that new national pastime, avoiding original thought by constantly demanding to be entertained.
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 8, 2005 | Netizen permalink |
| musings |
The first time I saw America spelled with a k,
I was for some reason thrilled. It was the Kafka novel. The idea of viewing my own country as a foreign one was an exciting project.
But it was never exciting enough to induce me actually to read Kafka's book. Kafka never seemed as funny to me as he did to . . . himself.
Thus, a velleity. Since that time, years ago, I've noticed many a leftist spelling the name of the continent with a k.
They mean the country, of course, the United States of.
This disrespect seemed funny at first, at least funnier than Kafka. Then it quickly wore out. Now it just seems witless. So many of the arguments, so much of the reasons given for alienation, strike me now as sophomoric. I may find much of America alien to me, yes, but I'm no so alienated that I take comfort in respelling the name of the continent.
Whether the continent's name comes from Amerigo Vespucci, as all the textbooks say, or from the Bristol merchant and financier of John Cabot's 1497 exploration, Richard Ameryk, I take a good deal of pleasure in the odd name, America. It would be a good name for a person. Much better than Amerigo.
Before I ever came across Kafka, though, I had developed an alternative phonetic alphabet, cleaning up American English. A typical kid's activity, no? I can't spell America on the Web how I devised it as a teenager, since we lack (I think) a good letter for the schwa, which begins and ends the name (I used a backwards E
in the upper case, and the upside-down e
of the linguist's schwa usage for the lower case). But, if we keep the a
as it is, we'd get Ameriqa as my spelling. I used the Q
as the K
sound. (I used the letter K
for hard TH
sound, actually. The C
was for the soft sh
sound. It was quite an elaborate system, with only two non-standard symbols, I think, one for NG
and one for the schwa.)
I like Ameriqa. It looks almost better on the page. And were I to spell it that way, I wouldn't associate myself with all the leftists whose main complaints about the country seem to be fundamentalist Christians and McDonald's drive-throughs.
But would my cleaning up of the alphabet, Bristol fashion, please Richard Ameryk? Or should I use a variant of his name, Amerike? I doubt if this ol' rich guy was any sort of leftist. And yet his name is spelled, in both variants, with a K
! It was vowels that gave him a problem. In honor of him, and to show one's alienation with the U.S., perhaps we really should spell the continent's name Ameryka!
Next question: Should we appropriate a curse from Amerike's day, and speak of the vowels of Christ
? I'd rather not. Or: Ai'd rakr not.
Wirkman Virkkala | May 11, 2005 | Netizen permalink |
George Bush now promotes a solution to Social Security insolvency: turn it from a badly conceived-and-run insurance/annuity retirement scheme into a standard government-handout retirement scheme. Screwing the wealthy out of their benefits means that the system is now designed only for the poor and the foolish. Isn't that just wonderful?
We are also getting our travelling papers. The federal government's consolidation of drivers' licesning means that, to work as an employee, or to travel between states on airlines or other public transportation, one must "show one's papers." Americans will soon know what it is like to "be a European." Or a subject of a tyrannical state. For that's what our old freedoms meant: we could do all sorts of things without being tracked by the government, without being sorted, spied on, waylaid, checked out, put in our place.
So I wonder: are conservatives still gung-ho about their president and their GOP-controlled Congress? If they are, they do so only be committing treason against their principles. (That is, if their principles were what they've said they were, and anything other than about power.)
And of course the Democrats say nothing. What principles of theirs oppose frank transfer programs? And they have nothing against changing the terms of a major government program, no matter what expectations people may have of it, no matter that they've been talking for years that Social Security was "a contract." Why, one of the reasons Social Security is in such a mess is the result of Democratic insistence at expanding benefits over the years, COLA adjustments, and the like. What Bush now attempts to do is what the Democrats would surely have done, had they been in power.
And as far as the civil liberty of not being corraled as so much cattle — well, the Democrats have long been more sympathetic to this kind of totalitarian "carding." Combine that long-standing bias with Hillary Clinton's new-found interest in closing America's borders, and you have the recipe for a New Fascism far greater than the current, mealy-mouthed version that the GOP is quickly establishing. And, we can be assured, the Democrats will return to power. And they will bring with them a backlash, but not in the form of new freedoms. Not if Hillary gets the nod for leadership. Nope. Freedom is a thing of the past. Expect more regulations, expect more speech control in the name of further fiddlings with campaign finance.
Oh, I suppose the Democrats could realign themselves as the new freedom party. But why would they? Their constituents seem generally less interested in freedom than the GOP's constituents — indeed, in the past, when people have prophesied darkly about the dangers of a national ID card, Democrats almost to a man make fun of these right-wing nuts
— and it would take quite a swing in ideology to change spots now.
Besides, the general trend has been shown that, in crisis after crisis, it's freedom that loses ground, not freedom that swings back. Oh, I guess we swap some freedoms for others. But the general progression is more control.
I'm sure I could get used to the new regime. Politicians are counting that we do. So I suggest that we steel ourselves and do just the opposite: resist.
But there's little point even in promoting such an idea. Americans will almost to a man sheepishly follow along. They love their corral. Why, that's where all their shit is! (They want their shit.)
As for me, I've never been able to hate America, like so many of my friends profess to. I've never wanted to live anywhere else. I always assume that the freedoms I enjoy in America will be more restricted elsewhere. But that's changing. I will soon, no doubt, let my hatred for the Republican and Democratic parties and their leaders bleed onto that great abstraction, too. I, too, will soon be an America-hater. Why? Because the Republicans are sealing the coffin on the republic. After that's gone, there's not much more to admire. Not politically, anyway.
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 12, 2005 | Netizen permalink
Jonah Goldberg has an interesting essay about the meaning of conservatism on National Review Online. I rarely read Jonah, despite his being named after my favorite minor prophet, because if I did I'd always be writing against what he wrote. . . . But this piece was especially thought-provoking.
On Instead of a Blog I pull out the stops in my argument against his characterizations of conservatism. Here I'll limit myself to what conservatism really is, not what it is not.
Conservatism is reactionism. There will always be a certain segment of the population that objects to a whole panoply of innovations not because they are bad, but because they are . . . innovations. In the 18th and the first half of the 19th century, the innovations were individualist liberal, libertarianish. So conservatives opposed those reforms. As the complexion of reform moved from individualism to collectivism, conservatives began losing their previous criticisms (rationalizations), and switched to defending individualist liberalism. So, in America at least, you will witness a lot of conservatives sounding like old-time liberals. But, once you scratch the surface, you'll see little liberality there.
They really are just reactionaries. All else is window dressing.
Today, conservatism is little more than just Not Leftism.
The real rhetorical power of conservatives comes from their choice of targets, easy targets: communists, socialists, welfare-state extremists, evasive post-modernist ideologues, radical environmentalists, animal rights activists, and the like. These groups have little to recommend them, so even a lackwit can score points against them. And since these ideologies are often quite at odds with individualist liberalism (libertarianism), you can see how conservatism and libertarianism might be sometimes confused.
But, since my youngest days experiencing conservatism in a rural area, the non-idea component of conservatism struck me as most important. I remember conservatives as intolerant of modish dress habits, innovative personal grooming techniques and styles, and non-monogamous sexual practices. Now, disagreeing with people on matters of taste is one thing; the anger and hatred and loathing expressed to such matters of taste seemed always a bit too strong, to say the least. When criticism of sex habits struck at irresponsibility, it was often hard to argue. But the funny thing is, conservatives rarely addressed crucial issues of responsibility. Too often they stressed conformity. Monogamy, in particular, was held to, even as every Sunday at church they revered several ancient old men who had multiple wives. It was all very strange. It got stranger when, in a more intellectual moment, the conservative in question would trot out talk of The Absolute. In church on Sunday they'd read and praise the Israelite genocide against the Canaanites, and blithely skip over polygamists galore. And then they'd turn around and preach against relativism.
Yup, these people were comfortable with the contradictions, that's for sure.
And then of course there was the matter of patriotism. The draft was a duty. Resisting it was unthinkable, and the venom spewed out at youngsters who would object to their own slavery and death for a dubious cause was quite extreme in the level of poison and the amounts of the spittle spewed out.
Conservatism has always been about hate. Hatred for the other. Hatred for people and things different.
That was what I gleaned as a youngster, watching the news and watching the reaction of my father's generation.
It's not that they didn't make good points. Many, sometimes even most of the points they made were worth thinking about. I have changed my mind many a time because of something a conservative has said or argued. They helped me reject modern liberalism, I'm sure. (Though frankly, I didn't need much help; after reading Locke, Jefferson, and Thoreau, and approving, how could one stomach the modern state and its then-prime cheerleading squad, the Democratic Party?)
It's just to say that I'd rather not live and think by hate.
Of course, now that alleged conservatives are sealing the American republic in the coffin of their bloated empire, I'm having new issues again with this hate. I'm hating them, and I'm hating the creature they've created.
Tomorrow, perhaps, I'll write about the exceptions to my broad-stroke characterization. Yes, yes; no, no: of course not all conservatives are like this. It's just the case that far, far too many of them are like this.
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 13, 2005 | Netizen permalink
So unsuperstitious am I that Friday the 13th came and went without me once thinking of it. I wrote 5/13/5 on a check and on several Web posts, so I knew about the cursed day. I just did not recognize it as such.
Thankfully, there will be no repercussions. Friday the 13th is celebrated around the nation more as a japery — as is Hallowe'en — than feared as a minatory alignment of day and number.
I went to town to get a whole bunch of library books (and, also, to pay my library subscription; shades of the old days, before free public libraries), and was pleased with my haul: books on Buddhism, Jefferson, the slave power, and the Constitution. I had a theme going, though Buddhism didn't quite fit.
And now, this morning, before I go off in another direction, I see this passage from James Russell Lowell, writing of Abe Lincoln:
Even in that half of the Union which acknowledged him as President, there ws a large and at that time dangerous minority, that hardly admitted his claim to the office, and even in the party that elected him there was also a large minority that suspected him of being secretly a communicant with the church of Laodicea. All that he did was sure to be virulently attaked as ultra by one side; all that was left undone, to be stignmatized as proof of lukewarmness and backsliding by the other.
A wondrous passage. Church of Laodicea
indeed! This refers to my favorite passage in the Revelation, perhaps in all the New Testament:
I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou were cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.
One of the great passages to reference when one feels like doing a bit of spewing. Or to think on when — say, on a Saturday morning, dated the 14th — one feels not too hot, not too cold. . . .
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 14, 2005 | Netizen permalink
The Inductions of Ethics,p. 307
I rebuilt this page, yesterday, to make it look just a little better. And it looked great in Safari and Firefox. Now I look at it from Explorer for OS 9, and it is utter crap. Who knows what it looks like in Windows?
Worse yet, I'm just not going to fix it today. It'll have to look horrible on some machines for a day or two. I've other things to do.
I just wish browsers would read the same code and put them up on screen the same way. But nope. Every one of them is different. I never check Opera. Oh, well.
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 14, 2005 | Netizen permalink
The Ethics of Individual Life,p. 497
In my longish essay on conservatism, recently on Instead of a Blog, I took on six principles commended to our attention by Jonah Goldberg. He cited John Derbyshire, whose writing, up until a few minutes ago, I had never read.
It turns out that those six principles are from a book entitled The Right Nation, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (two surnames that could not be mistaken for anything other than British). The authors argue that American conservatives prioritize the first three principles on the list (anti-statism, liberty, and patriotism) over the equally Burkean final three (institutional traditionalism, progress-wary skepticism, and elitism) . . . something like me, you may notice.
Derbyshire then shows that modern American conservatives fail even in terms of their emphasized principles. Derbyshire quotes Jeffrey Hart: The Bush presidency often is called conservative. That is a mistake. It is populist and radical, and its principal energies have roots in American history, and these roots are not conservative.
We are living, Derbyshire insists, in The Twilight of Conservatism.
American exceptionalist-conservatism still holds out in odd corners of national life,
but the movement itself is living in false hope.
This is too bad, I guess, because the principles Derbyshire identifies as exceptionalist-conservative are basically good principles. He doesn't really explain why things have gotten so bad. But isn't it easy to see where things went wrong? In the course of building a political movement, the principles have always been treated mostly as a piety, rarely as a living-and-breathing vision of reform. Choosing George Bush and Dick Cheney as standard-bearers was pretty much the last straw. The Republicans chose style over substance, power and electability
over principles and virtue. (A less virtuous duo can hardly be imagined, considering their history of corporate manipulations and stockholder betrayal.)
But, as I argued a few days ago, American exceptionalist
conservatism is not about principles. It is about passions and reaction and hatred. The number of actual principled conservatives is remarkably low. And far too many of them refrain from criticizing groups within the Republican Party. How many conservatives (or libertarians) have held back from criticizing George W. Bush and the current Republican Congress because they are, in fact, Republicans? The fact that there's nothing very conservative about either doesn't seem to be much of an imperative for a thoroughgoing critique.
Part of this is fear of the mob. The mob of Republican Party stalwarts is very much anti-left, anti-Democratic Party, and pro-Don't Betray the GOP.
And that's often all they are. (I read lots of letters-to-the-editor, to a particular venue, and my revulsion for the rank-and-file Republican Conservative grows every day. There is a huge tide of populist Republicans who ditto partisans like Rush Limbaugh. And this tide has corrupted the whole conservative movement, from what I can tell.) The mob is certainly not much interested in liberty, or fearful of the state . . . apart from the Democrats running it.
The exceptions? We're told that crunchy cons
are an exception. To me, to the extent that they exist, they're part of the problem. These people are mere life-style conservatives; their dedication to principle is personal but not political; it comes to nothing.
Libertarian conservatives might be an exception. But the ones who voted for Bush still too rarely criticize Bush and Co., long after the betrayals have become obvious. I understand libecons
(my term: it puns on libertarian
and economist
as well as conservative
). They want to be relevant. But whenever they compromise their principles with the anti-libertarian forces within their party and the conservative movement (and many conservatives are very much against the free market, and very much for big government), just to get along, their principles become mere artifacts of piety and not political positions at all.
The conservative movement has crossed the Rubicon. The age of the libecon is over within the Republican Party. The party has been transformed into an American Exceptionalist movement. The only principles that remain are power and patriotism. This is a form of mind-numbingly stupid populism. Libecons have no place there . . . other than as court eunuchs.
Perhaps the only hope is another breed, the democon.
Not as in Democratic Party conservative, but as a truly non-partisan democratic conservatism. With this kind of populist conservatism, gaining power has nothing to do with exercising it for as long as possible, for whatever values the coalition is beholden to. The very idea is to diminish power. Their goals are rather libertarian, but by committing themselves to political reforms on the order of term limits, initiative and referendum, and the like, and in opposition to growth-of-government behavior of the political class like pork-barrel spending (now rampant) and the liquidation of civil liberties (now official with campaign finance laws), democons strike a very different pose than do the libertarian economists who keep on talking about tax cuts and deregulation.
The movement is small. And it probably won't grow beyond a certain ineffective level if it doesn't tap into a wider segment of the population than that of disaffected conservatives. But if it can ally itself with the growing concern amongst allegedly left-leaning Democrats about the nature of democracy, then it might go somewhere. Democons will only grow in significant numbers if they work against such things as paperless voting and for reforms such as Instant Run-off Voting.
Whatever their future, democons like Paul Jacob and Eric O'Keefe have a lot more going for them than the hopeless and hopelessly compromised Republican libecons we've grown to . . . ignore — and certainly the Libertarian Party activists whose idea of political change betrays a peculiar obsession with Sisyphus, not Prometheus. Lots of Republican and Democratic and independent voters are populists in the democons' better sense: of wanting to diminish accumulations of power at higher levels in distant regions. They aren't so much moved by hatred of cultural or ideological opponents but by actual political corruption. Imagine that.
There's something conservative in this, but something liberal too. Burkean? Not really. But Burke was something of a berk. It's time for better thoughts and better political programs.
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 15, 2005 | Netizen permalink
George Lucas seemed to have an adult's imagination in his first movie, THX-911 (or whatever it was called; the title reminded me of the part number for Sony cassette tape). Why, then, in each successive movie, did he lurch further and further back into a child's imagination?
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe THX was not adult, merely boring (I forget; I remember enjoying it — but then, I was young). But surely American Graffiti was a teen flick, and Star Wars a pre-teen flick. With The Empire Strikes Back he edged a little closer to adult territory, and then . . . splurch, he plopped down for the final entry into a Teddy Bear's Picnic, a sort of kindergarten space opera.
The prequel series, of course, has been mostly dumb. To call it childish would be to cast aspersions onto childishness. You'd think it'd be fun to watch a republic being overthrown for an empire (I mean, it's the story of our age), but the writing has been so bad, the dialogue about as silly as movie dialogue gets, with the exception of the dreadful Sin City. The love scenes between Anakin and the queen (or is she just a princess?) is one of the most idiotic things I've ever witnessed on screen. I actually played it back in incredulity several times. It was worth owning the DVD for a few weeks. It allowed me to bask in badness to a degree that even television rarely approaches.
The appeal of the series, I hazard, is a case of imprinting. It became an obsession because of one of the most effective unions of visual style and musical motifs. The Darth Vader theme, by John Williams, is brilliant. I know I'm not supposed to say this. I know I'm supposed to say it is derivative tripe. Blah blah blah. Right: I'm not a big Williams fan. Yes, yes, I know: he's no Bernard Herrmann. But that doesn't take away the achievement of his score for the first movie, and for the second. Those motifs were so good that they fixed the images of the characters in our (the viewers') minds. All of Lucas's silly pretentions to mythology were made less silly by the very presence of the music.
So, that's my theory. It's the music. The visual and concepts, yes, too; but without the music, the film would have been nothing. Had any other composer written the score, it would probably not have worked.
And we would all have been spared the recently concluded prequel trilogy.
Love makes the world go 'round,
goes the old saying. Wrong. It's
inertia.
The original Force that set it all going was a score by John Williams.
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 20, 2005 | Netizen permalink | FilmFlam
Jean Sibelius twice revised his Fifth Symphony. I have only now heard the first version of it. Had Sibelius not revised it, he would have been left with a symphony on the order of his First: interesting, fascinating in spots, but not of the first rank. His first try was second rate. He was right to revise. The final version, from the very opening to the very ending, is better than his first edition.
I'm glad I listened to a recorded performance of the earlier version. But I don't think I'll listen to it often. What I've known for years as Sibelius's Fifth Symphony
is one of the greatest aesthetic achievements of human civilization, one of the greatest works ever composed. The earlier version is, well, a trial run of the themes. But he had not put them together quite right, yet.
And there is a discordant, interpolated snatch of a melody, first obtrusively heard in the trumpet, and later in the violins, that struck my ears as way out of place. It almost seems as if Charles Ives had crept into Sibelius's cabin and added a few deliberate wrong notes! Not quite as startling as Ives's conclusion to his Second Symphony, but almost. And the great, witty, weird ending to Sibelius's Fifth? In the first version, nothing nearly as odd. Or as satisfying (though I know many performances that take it too slow, thus killing the spirit of it).
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 20, 2005 | Netizen permalink
On NASA: TERRA, today, there is an interesting explanation of a geological formation . . . of frozen water.
It is pleasant to come across a new scientific term relating to our planet, unaccompanied by preaching.
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 21, 2005 | Netizen permalink
Today on Townhall.com, Paul Jacob compares America's mostly unnecessary government-subsidized radio and TV networks to old-time Pravda (A more balanced Pravda?
May 22, 2005). Apt. As Jacob concludes, National Propaganda Radio and Propaganda Broadcasting Service should have their umbilical cords with American government cut. I bet the two could continue, even without public support. If not, no great loss.
With all the cable and satellite stations available, there's little that PBS does that others do not do. Nature shows? Several channels. History? Several again, including a channel called, yes, History. Art? Music? Movies? You've got to be kidding, right? These are all over the dial.
The only thing that PBS has that no one else seems to have, is a lock on the long and boring presentation of news coverage, the oh-so-serious-and-solemn March to the Prison Camps that is PBS's nightly news. You have to really be interested in the subject to be interested in this soporiphic — unless it is sleep that you are looking for. Or cultic hypnotism.
No one else does news quite like PBS. Not even NPR. On NPR, a wider variety of subjects and voices and sound bites can be heard. But PBS still pulls the solemnity act. I guess it's nice that someone does something different (and since CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN are often quite bad, it's nice to have a non-Fox alternative). But couldn't the good people there have a slice of an attitude? An attitude on the side?
The cultishness of PBS's viewers has been long understood. And I guess the relentless solemnity of the news shows is understandable, too. McNeil or Lehrer (which one is left? I forget) or Whoever is to your average PBS contributor to what Lyndon LaRouche is to . . . his crowd. Cultists come in all shapes and sizes. The PBS cult is the cult of college grads desperately trying to hold on to the utility of their college educations. (It's what makes them better than the average boob who only watches the regular news.)
I'm hoping that cutting the Corporation for Public Broadcasting loose from the U.S. government will have at least one effect: make the public broadcasters
squirm, squirm so hard they slither out of the solemnity suits.
Hey, they might wind up producing a truly interesting news show. (That still won't mean me joining their cult; but that's another matter.)
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 21, 2005 | Netizen permalink
Bill O'Reilly recently stated he couldn't tell the difference between a wookiee and a libertarian. Poor, benighted fellow. The distinction is easy to make:
Wookiees are hairy and brown. Among libertarians, there's only one who's Harry and Browne.
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 24, 2005 | Netizen permalink
Slavery still exists. It's a multibillion dollar industry worldwide. Or so says the International Labour Organization.
The organization's figures won't convince everybody. It's hard to make good estimates of illegal activities, especially those under as much opprobrium as slavery. Further, the report devotes lots of attention to the sex industry. The trouble here is that the world's oldest profession is not exactly known for its honesty.
Even less reliable are some who worry about the sex industry. In America, we still have the Mann Act on the books, which was allegedly put there to squash white slavery.
Of course, most of the people persecuted (oops, prosecuted) were free people doing things prudes didn't like. You know, like going for weekends in the Big City to have a Good Time.
So, getting reliable stories? Difficult.
Still, slavery does exist. Well, the report said that 12 million people are working in coercive, slave-like conditions.
How many actual slaves, compared to how many Slaves Lite? I don't know. No one likely does.
In the Amazon, workers taken on by a gato, or gangmaster, to clear jungle and make large cattle farms can lead to slave-like conditions. In some cases, the area to which the workers are taken is so remote that leaving becomes impossible. Further, some are prevented from even trying to leave by armed guards. And when employers charge workers more in living expenses than they make in wages, that sure sounds like slavery, doesn't it?
In too many cases around the world — especially in developing countries, but also even in our own — there are cases where employees are contracted for by fraudulent (or even more coercive) means, and the workers feel trapped because they are trapped.
Slavery may even exist in America, amongst illegal immigrants who basically sell themselves into slavery, apparently on the thought that it is better to be a slave in the land of the free than an ostensibly free person under an impoverished tyranny. This was nicely illustrated in the current film, Crash.
Once again, America harbors slaves and doesn't do much about it. Very strange.
It's also strange that many alleged libertarians still underemphasize the importance of slavery as a cause of the Civil War, in part to excuse secessionists. And I bet that many libertarians, today, will likely dismiss the recent reports as the fancy of leftists. There's much to be said against modern libertarians. If they can't oppose slavery, then what use are they?
Slavery ended, we thought, in the 19th century. But what ended was officially sanctioned slavery. The crime, it seems, goes on.
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 25, 2005 | Netizen permalink
When the author of 2 Timothy wrote the classic line All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness,
did he think that the very words he was writing was Scripture?
The recipient, surely, assumed the author meant the ancient Hebrew texts, not the words he was reading.
If the reader was Timothy, the addressee, this was especially so. If the author was Paul, this was doubly especially so! You see, Paul believed Jesus was coming back any day. He wasn't writing Scripture. Scripture is what you call revered texts of an old religion. Christianity wasn't an old religion. It was a movement of people who expected the world to end soon.
Of course, this epistle was likely not written by Paul, and not read by Timothy. It is a pastoral epistle, held to be deutero-Pauline
— that is, a pious lie. It was written to seem like it was by Paul. But most scholars who know words and style and concepts, and proceed cautiously, make the stark claim that it is a forgery.
Years after its composition it was canonized, made into Scripture.
But that was by democratic vote at a religious council. Not by inspiration of God.
I first had doubted Paul's belief in his own theo-scribal pretentious when I was about 17. I had no knowledge of the textual criticisms of the epistles. I knew no other textual doubts. I had been taught to accept everything in my Bible as Scripture.
It took me a while to work out of that mindset, and it was other lines of argument that took me out, not expert criticism of vocabulary and concepts.
Later on, my great wonder is how anyone could engage in pious lying, the kind of forgery that likely made much of the New Testament. But hey: in a cause, people do all sorts of weird things.
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 28, 2005 | Netizen permalink
I took a wrong turn, today, and drove for several hours in the hills, down logging roads I had never traveled before. But I was never lost; I always knew where I wasn't.
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 30, 2005 | Netizen permalink
Epigramwill do,
blunder.
A blurb informed me of an old saying I hadn't come across before: The Devil, they say, has all the best tunes. Until now he has also had the video games market sewn up.
The article in question is about video games, something I've no interest in, and will leave to those with nothing better to do.
It turns out that William Booth is credited with the salient question: Why should the devil have all the best tunes?
Just as the Apostle Paul before him — who couldn't see a good reason not to eat the meat sacrificed to alien gods (devils) — Booth saw no reason not to co-opt the tunes of popular culture to serve his Savior:
The adoption of such music was soon put to full use. On Saturday afternoon, May 13, 1882, the congregation at the opening of the Clapton Congress Hall joined heartily in the chorus of Gipsy Smith's solo,O the Blood of Jesus cleanses white as snowto the music ofI traced her little footsteps in the snow.There were no qualms of conscience. Many people gathered there knew none of the hymn tunes or gospel melodies used in the churches; the music hall had been their melody school.
Very clever of the proselytizers, but their marketing method engenders several problems.
Christians thus blow, aesthetically, with the winds of popular culture. They no longer create much. They adapt, adopt, steal. I'm a thief for the Lord
is not exactly a rallying cry worth giving up one's sins for.
This is most embarrassingly the case with so-called Christian rock,
which should deeply embarrass Christians. Hip-swinging rhythms for the Lord is risible, not anything approaching sacred.
Of course, evangelical Christianity has lacked taste since about the time of the tent revivals, and for obvious reasons. Charles Ives made something out of the hymns of late 19th century tent congregations, but, with a few exceptions, these hymns are pretty simple-minded and uninteresting in themselves, as are the love songs to God
that pass for a hymnody in modern fundie churches.
It's not my place to complain, of course. But as someone who loves the music of J.S. Bach and Olivier Messiaen and Arvo Pärt — to name three great composers who were also believing Christians (Lutheran, Catholic, and Orthodox, respectively; the latter still alive) — it's very difficult to imagine anything like worship coming out simple-minded lyrics and equally simple-minded tunes
that are used in today's fundamentalist Sunday Schools and church serices; they would seem better at wooing a thirteen-year-old into the clutches of an aging pedophile. Talk about suffer the little children
!
The hymns I grew up with ranged from the horrible to the goose-bump-inducingly beautiful. I quickly learned to discern: the simple-minded crowd pleasers were almost all written after 1850. The melodies were simple, and the harmonies stuck close to I, IV, and V chords. The bass and tenor parts were utterly uninteresting. Bringing in the Sheaves,
Power in the Blood,
and others of that ilk couldn't hold a candle to such hymns as Holy, Holy, Holy,
Now Thank We All Our God,
and The Church's One Foundation.
These earlier melodies and harmonies far surpass the later, simpler hymns. The quality of the poetry is better in these latter, too.
By mid-century, though, hymn quality began to deteriorate. The Sunday School movement, for instance, put out a lot of children's music, like Jesus Loves Me,
the quality of which was usually rather low. There were great songs, though, in that vein, such as When He Cometh.
Philip Bliss wrote a wonderful hymn which I call Man of Sorrows
but is known by the more upbeat title of Hallelujah, What a Savior!
— this hymn was uninterestingly harmonized (the quality of harmonizations went down in Protestant hymnody as more uneducated people began to be drawn into the ranks of the creative Christian class), but is very interesting melodically: it suggests E Phrygian rather than C Major. (I've made such a four-part arrangement; it's much better than the original, and with far more a minor feel — and I've altered it rhythmically, too, to conform to the standard church practice of slowing down at the hymn's end.)
The little choruses
that make up most evangelical singing these days are not worth studying. The words don't tell a story, and rarely get more than the simplest idea across. The harmonic character of the tunes rarely stretches to suggest a key change. They are on the order of Jesus Loves Me,
but for adults. Ostensibly.
I find this utterly disgusting, but Christians can console themselves with Jesus' own words about the last and the first, suffering little children, and Paul's words about the foolish and childish outshining the wise and the adult.
Christian rock, of course, is a greater indecency. Rock is one of the historically and musicologically sexual of popular song styles. The rhythms are perfect for hip-swinging courtship rituals, a sort of pre-coital dance music; the lyrics have been almost entirely dedicated to sex, drugs, and childish protest. To turn the style to fit Christian worship is . . . I think mostly an illusion. How many Christians really worship with that claptrap? Mostly, it's just a way to smuggle in the old vices
into a born-again life-style. It's pretty funny.
Of course, Christians can simply say Why should the Devil have all the good rhythms?
But frankly, the limited range of rhythms in rock are certainly not the best in music. And its syncopated melodies do not seem to me conducive to contemplation, reflection, or humility. Further, these melodies are certainly not the best. If Christians, today, think they are best, and steal and emulate them for that reason, it is only because they are uneducated momes.
Gospel
music would seem to be an exception to my censure; its similarity to rock is obvious, and some of it is good, and obviously many who use it do use it for worship. My only response is that these people are given to glossalalia, and if you think the paroxysms of twisting nonsense known as speaking in tongues
is anything to admire, we have nothing really to talk about, you and I. We are of different civilizations — if what you have can be called civilization. (Modern-day glossalalia is a risible tradition that interests me from the perspective of abnormal psychology; those who think it a link to the Numinous and the Transcendent may direct their talk about it to directions other than mine — I suggest the wind.) It seems obvious to me that the gospel music tradition is a form of worship more akin to Dionysian paganism than any respectable religiosity, a fig leaf thrown over a sublimated sexuality. The fact that those who swing that way have often been prudes doesn't undermine my interpretation at all.
I am working on the theory (perhaps wholly lacking foundation) that religiosity is something different from sexual frustration unleashed within the bounds of a liturgy.
With modern Christian rock, of course, American white Protestantism moves closer to the African-American tradition, and sex becomes the real focus of the Church. Not a bad thing, perhaps, politically — what rational man is not tired of the two-faced anti-sexuality of modern Protestant politics? — but to those of us who are familiar with all the traditions of Christianity, and the high points of artistic achievement that a few of those traditions reached, then the music of modern-day Christendom seems just another mockery of the past. And of the best that humanity has produced.
Why do I care? Well, I care about music. I hate to see a whole religion turning away from a wonderfully literate and artful hymnody. And I prefer not to have much to do with people who prance about and moon about Things Unseen to tunes that remind me of nothing more than those best used to get the panties off the girls and the condoms on the boys.
W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | May 31, 2005 | Netizen permalink
The current entry is repeated on the main page of this blog, listed last on the archive page for the current month of the blog. Why? For the convenience of the blogger. No one else.
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