Nuremberg (2025)

Yesterday, I saw the movie Nuremberg with a friend.  It was ... OK, but I can't help think that there was material for a much better movie.  There are several things that I noticed at a nit-picking level, such as the use of language that seems to belong to the year 2025 than to 1946, but let's concentrate on the larger issues.  

1. Let's get this out of the way first:  the movie was shaped to draw parallels between Göring and Trump.  There were too many such winks and nods to the audience, and I heard the Canadian audience reacting as programmed by the screenwriters.  A story like this should be about history and timeless truths, not about contemporary politics.  It should be better than Saturday Night Live. 
   
   
2. I think the biggest failure of the film is the lack of emotional stakes.  For the most part, the sentences were foregone conclusions -- especially for the likes of Göring himself.  Everyone knew that.  This was a ritual, both the trial and the execution; if the only point were to produce dead Nazis, Göring's cyanide pill did the job just as well as a noose would have. 
   
   The purpose of the ritual was largely to emphasize that the crimes of Nazi Germany were different from even typical war crimes; that there is an objective moral order that nations might ignore but which they cannot destroy.  The movie makes a serious mistake in not merely downplaying, but largely denying this.  None of the characters in the movie see good and evil as moral issues, but only as practical issues to prevent GERMANY from starting a Third World War. That, however, was prevented through much more practical means than the Nuremberg Trials.
   
   If the insight that the capacity for almost unlimited evil lies within all of us was intended to produce an emotional crisis, it should have been shown having that impact on one of the characters -- probably Kelly, since he seems to be the protagonist.  THIS NEVER HAPPENS.  The most he or anyone else does is worry that "other people" (in every nation, but still "other") are vulnerable to the appeal of evil.  None of them ever worry that they might themselves become evil.  
   
   
3. Schindler's List had the emotional impact it did because the Jewish victims of Nazism were shown as people, not merely as victims.  The closest the movie comes to doing this is in the family story of Sgt. Triest, but he is a minor character, the story is told rather than shown, it is very brief, and it only comes near the end of the movie.  Triest should have been the central character instead of Kelly.  
   
   
4. A better soundtrack could have helped shape the emotional pull of the movie.  Even Star Wars [A New Hope] is the great movie it is largely due to t he soundtrack.  
   
   
5. The "gotcha" moment in the trial is actually a failure.  Göring was not to be hanged for his feelings or for hypothetical crimes; he was sentenced to death for actual crimes in the real world.  Asking if he would still have supported Hitler "if" he had known about the extermination of the Jews might make him less charming, but it would have little or no impact on the trieal. 

Three Days of Darkness?

Certain Catholic circles take great interest in various prophecies regarding remarkable chastisements that are expected to happen if a truly noteworthy worldwide conversion and repentance does not occur.  When I say "remarkable", I mean things on par with Cecil B. DeMille's movie The Ten Commandments.  

Such events don't seem to fit the style with which God acts in this age.  Of course there are still outright miracles, and, for that matter, there are still demonic possessions, but for the most part, God seems to want people to decide to accept or reject Him based on more subtle evidences, such as the witness of Christians living ordinary lives in holiness [at which we too often fail], the wonders of the created universe, the course of history, etc., rather than based on spectacle.  I suspect this flows from the same reason as the Ascension:  if Christ were still physically and visibly on earth, there would be less merit in believing in Him and more fault in disbelieving in Him.  

"A wicked and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign," and our generation is certainly wicked and adulterous enough for that.  Be that as it may, one of the DeMille-esqe signs involves Three Days of Darkness, despite the prediction's dubious history.

But prophecy usually takes a spiritual perspective, so that things that really have eternal significance are presented in ways that seem to call for special effects.  Could that be what's going on here?  Outside of historical accounts (like the three days Christ spent in the tomb, counting part of Good Friday and part of Easter Sunday), an expression like "three days" likely means a short, but not negligible, period of time; it could easily mean a few decades.  As for darkness, what could that be but the inability to see, the inability to understand what is in front of us, and the fear and confusion that go along with that? 

As I have said before, it looks like a spiritual neutron bomb has been detonated over us.  The point of a neutron bomb was that it left buildings standing, but killed off the life inside them; in a similar way, we see institutions like the Boy Scouts continue on, but with their souls destroyed.   Could it be that the mystics were right, and that for refusing one too many opportunities to repent, we have been handed over to a short period of darkness in which we, as a society, will find the truth impossible to believe and incredible foolishness compelling?  

The darkness is certainly here.  It's the "short time" part that concerns me. 

"... Various nations will be annihilated"

Lately I have been thinking about this aspect of the message claimed (quite credibly) to have been delivered to peasant children (who did not understand the message at all, and in fact thought "Russia" was the name of a woman) near the Portuguese town of Fatima over a century ago:

To prevent this, I shall come to ask for the consecration of Russia to my Immaculate Heart, and the Communion of Reparation on the First Saturdays. If my requests are heeded, Russia will be converted, and there will be peace; if not, she will spread her errors throughout the world, causing wars and persecutions of the Church. The good will be martyred, the Holy Father will have much to suffer, various nations will be annihilated. In the end, my Immaculate Heart will triumph. The Holy Father will consecrate Russia to me and she will be converted, and a period of peace will be granted to the world.

Much could be said about this, but it is best to keep it short. 

Firstly, "the errors of Russia" are like "Lou Gehrig's Disease".  Gehrig was not the first person to contract amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and if you come down with the disease, it isn't his fault.  It's much the same with the errors of Russia, which were not Orthodoxy, but Communism.  More specifically, it was how Communism

• denied that God exists at all, or at the very least, reduced God to a mere figure of speech,
• made a god of politics, and 
• made economics the center of everything.

Just like you do not need to be Lou Gehrig to have ALS,  you can be a fervent Capitalist and share the errors of Russia.  In fact, most fervent Capitalists do.

The interesting question, though, is, "What does it mean for a nation to be annihilated?"  The answer, I suspect, is found in Matthew 5:13:

Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.

A nation that definitively rejects its vocation is, perhaps, good for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men.  It is hardly an exaggeration to say it has been annihilated.  Like a neutron bomb, this kind of annihilation leaves most of the structures standing, but dead. 

And yet, God "quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were."  He can restore to life a valley of dry bones, although they must first become dry bones. 

Cane Syrup

As mentioned in the description for this blog, my family used to make cane syrup when I was a child.  The picture above is of my dad near the cane mill at my granddad's garden in Overstreet, Florida.  I would guess the year to be in the mid-to-late 1970s.  It could not be much later, since my grandma died in 1980, and she was the only one who really knew when the syrup was done cooking.  I know my dad grew sugar cane once or twice after she died, but I think we only used that for chewing, and we never made syrup again.  

I have bittersweet memories of those times.  I distinctly remember how we kids were given the syrup from the sides of the big kettle, which was set into a brick base under which a fire would be made; there was a roof overhead, but the walls were made of mosquito netting.  The mill may at one point have been turned by a beast of burden -- or even by my dad and uncles -- but by my time it was turned by a little walk-behind tractor.

I could probably take you to the spot where this all took place, but that garden has been sold after having stood abandoned for at least 40 years.  The kettle was recovered from some neighbors who pried it loose to steal it.  All the buildings have surely collapsed, and the jungle has taken over.  There would be little to see, though it might make an interesting exercise for archaeology students. 

The photo was emailed to me after my dad's death in August. 

On a happier note, there are places where you can still see cane syrup made,  Here's a link to a news story about it in the local news.  These videos give a feel for what was going on, though they are on something more like a commercial scale.

When Does Life Begin?

 This question reminds me of a quote from p. 57 of Science Made Stupid:  "One of the mammals' evolutionary advantages was that they bore their young alive.  As research has conclusively shown, animals that bore their young dead generally got nowhere."

From a scientific point of view, life does not begin at birth, nor when one registers to vote as a Democrat, as some seem to believe.  But it also does not begin at conception, as is often stated.  It began, apparently, only once, and that was more than 3.7 billion years ago.  Ever since then, life has been passed down to succeeding generations with no gap in between.  

Asking when a human organism comes into being is a different question.  That is the question for which the scientific answer is, generally, "at conception"; I say generally because some (it must be emphasized) purely theoretical questions are posed by the production of identical twins, triplets, etc.  These questions may be interesting to think about, but they do not provide a license to play with the lives of humans at an embryonic stage of development.  But my main point is that Catholics and others who care about the truth need to be careful with the language we use.   We are told that no one puts old wine in new wineskins, but we have no alternative to putting old biological life into new organisms.

It should also go without saying that biology is not equipped to detect the soul.  The existence of the soul can be derived from philosophy, as Aristotle did it, but not from the natural sciences, so the immediate creation of each spiritual soul by God cannot be proved or refuted by science.

Talking about Science

 I'm pretty fed up with people talking about science who know nothing about science.  One blog post in particular, to which I will not link because it does not deserve the extra views, has provoked this comment, but that is really only the last straw.  Right and left, atheist and believer, people who have taken the minimum science content necessary to obtain a university degree seem to think they have deep insights into what science is and why it is so great or what is so wrong with it.  That's pretty much on par with making sweeping critiques of Mexico based on regular visits to Taco Bell -- only they would never dare to make the kind of ridiculous generalizations about a nation that they do about people who understand science.  

Markov Chains and Progress

The boasted privilege of freemen under the direction of political power to be exercised by a single individual, would seem to be adopted by an Administration of Independence security of the object for which may be destroy or keep down a bad passion of our free institutions and prejudices, so long will the States governing a common with every other citizen; and although the medium of the elective franchise. If such could not, I conceive, have been the pleasure of the people but that the enactment should never be used with greater effect for unhallowed union of the whole country for generosity and nobleness of feeling may be destroyed by the respects the aggregate people of the Federal Government, the accountable agent, not a vestige of the people to be most stupid men in England spoke of "their American subjects. It looks to the aggrandizement of the Territories of the Constitution or because errors had been committed by anyone who has blessed us by the gifts of combinations violative of the elective governments arises from this high place to which I shall be exerted to prevent the formation of political privileges, and this seems to be the corner stone upon which our American citizens requiring compliance with entire control the free operations as the genuine spirit of liberty is the spirit of freedom, and as long as the understanding. The citizen; and although devoted republican principles which separate the evils which have been that under no circumstances of their own constant nurture. To the never-dying worm in his attempts have been made, hitherto justice which the Constitution, "all the liberties of the State governments, of the scheming politician dissipated, and, avoiding the democrat of Athens with them, and as long as they might deceive and flattered with greater error in the bosoms of those feelings which belong to the President to communicate information and prudent administration not to have prepared it agreeably to his will and the lesser Asia would furnish the larger dividend.

The text above was generated using the PHP Markov chain text generator at http://projects.haykranen.nl/markov/demo/ using the inaugural address of William Henry Harrison as the input text and a 7th-order Markov chain.  

Note the dream-like quality of the text.  Short pieces of it tend to make some kind of sense, but longer stretches are incoherent.  It is what Macbeth claimed life to be:  "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."  The incoherence is due to the fact that the text was generated from probabilities based on only the past few words; there is no long-term memory, let alone actual thought.

The same applies to societies as a whole, because at no time do we have more than a few generations living simultaneously, and most of a nation's past will have happened before living memory.  Each new generation has some hope or ambition of correcting what it sees as the most obvious, insupportable, or insufferable wrongs -- wrongs it will typically see as being the consequences of choices by the generation immediately previous.  A generation or two further back is likely to be seen through rose-colored glasses, in part due to the contrast with the generation of one's parents; generations even further back, never having been met, are scarcely thought of, much less understood.  

Yes, we have books and (now) recordings, but these are no substitute for experience, or even for simply getting to know someone who has had the direct experience.  Think of it this way:  it is one thing to watch a movie about a love story, but it is another to actually fall in love; it is one thing to watch a YouTube video that shows the view from the front seat of a roller coaster, but it is another to ride the roller coaster.  There was even something special about hearing stories from my Great Uncle Mitchell about driving trucks across France to bring supplies to the troops pushing in on Germany, or meeting Mike Jacobs, Holocaust survivor and founder of the Holocaust museum in Dallas.  Both those good men are gone now, and their generation will soon be altogether gone; and books and videos cannot fill the hole they leave.

So what do we lose with the passing of generations, except for stories?  I suspect the most important thing we lose is the experience to know how to react to new evils as they arise.  Sometimes it is best to mind our own business and let events play out, since intervention is likely to cause more problems than it solves; sometimes it is best to speak up; sometimes it is best to watch quietly and prepare to act if some threshold is passes; sometimes it is best to act forcefully and decisively.  Those who have lived through multiple crises should be better judges of which hills it is worth dying on, figuratively or even literally -- of when it really is a good day to die, and when it is not.

The second most important thing we lose is experience in recognizing idealistic rubbish.  In The Everlasting Man, Chesterton asks, "Does anybody in the world believe that a soldier says, 'My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shall go on till it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all the advantages of my government obtaining a warm water port in the Gulf of Finland! Can anybody suppose that a clerk turned conscript says, 'If I am gassed I shall probably die in torments; but it is a comfort to reflect that should I ever decide to become a pearl-diver in the South Seas, that career is now open to me and my countrymen!"  No person of mature judgment would say that, obviously, but history shows that people -- especially young people -- often really do fall for propaganda because they lack the experience to detect a con or even to recognize the correct priorities; after all, it is mostly young people who commit suicide over a failed romance or due to online bullying. 

Human Absurdity

Recent popes have had much to say about human dignity, but this is not the right time to talk about dignity.  Everyone in today's society believes in human dignity -- or at least in their own dignity, if more questionably in the dignity of others.  So for example, the Black Lives Matter movement is about dignity; so is the Sons of Confederate Veterans organization.  In short, all of identity politics -- right or left, national or racial or sexual -- and most of the short tempers tearing society apart are due to people intensely feeling and vigorously protecting their own dignity, something that used to be called the deadly sin of pride.

Instead, it would be much better to regain a healthy appreciation for the absurdity of all humans, most especially ourselves.  We must learn to laugh at ourselves again.

We have dignity because we are creatures made in the image of God, and we are absurd because we are creatures made in the image of God.  It is possible to have a finite image of the infinite, but it is not possible without distortion.  God is eternal, but we are mortal; God is omniscient, but we are ignorant; God is omnipotent, but we are weak.  Yet we really do bear His image; we are like fun house mirrors held up to God.

The kind of absurdity I am talking about should lead to humility as well as humor, but it is not degrading.  The image of God we bear is inevitably distorted, but it need not be desecrated; we may be unavoidably comical, but we do not have to be corruptions.

Was Frodo a "Type" of Jew?

• The survivors of Atlantis arrived on the mainland thousands of years ago.

• They were physically superior to the "lesser men" already living on the mainland.

• They were even more technologically superior to the "lesser men", creating objects and performing tasks that even today would appear magical.

• They rightfully conquered a large part of the mainland.

• They subsequently declined physically, mentally, and technologically due to interbreeding with "lesser men".

All these ideas were part of the intellectual atmosphere of the late 1800's and early 1900's.  They seemed to be supported by the increasingly obvious common heritage of the Indo-European family of languages.  They seemed to be supported by finds such as Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of Troy and Arthur Evans' discovery of the labyrinth-like palace at Knossos, which indicated there might be a basis in reality for old myths and legends.  They seemed to be supported by the  "revelations" of esoteric cults like Spiritualism and Theosophy.

All these ideas were embraced whole-heartedly by an important part of the Nazi Party, who saw them as proof of the superiority of the "Aryan race".  In fact, the SS sponsored an expedition to Tibet under Ernst Schäfer to prove these ideas and flesh them out in detail.

All these ideas are present in The Lord of the Rings.  (Well, strictly speaking, it is The Silmarillion that explicitly identified Númenor with Atlantis.)

For years I have found that disturbing.  Likewise disturbing is the tendency of fans of Tolkien to accept the "superiority" of the Númenóreans without batting an eye.  However, I have recently come to believe that Tolkien was actually making a strong, if perhaps subtle, anti-Nazi point.  

To cut to the point, Tolkien actually did insert a "Superman" into Lord of the Rings:  Boromir.  Tall, strong, brave, of noble blood, accustomed to command, Boromir was willing to take what he wanted.  For the greater good of his Volk, Boromir violated his conscience.  Even though he repented in the end, Boromir came much closer to the SS ideal than Aragorn ever did. (I suspect that Nietzsche would have faulted Aragorn for his adoption of "slave morality".)  Boromir was also the only member of the fellowship who was no longer alive when Sauron was defeated and Aragorn was crowned.  Regardless of what Aragorn said to comfort his dying friend, the Aryan superman had failed.

At the other extreme we have the hobbits.  It is actually rather firmly established that hobbits were in fact just an inconspicuous race of men, but men so different that both they and other men thought of hobbits as something altogether different.  Númenóreans were tall, but hobbits were tiny; Númenóreans were bold, but hobbits, though rarely cowards, despised adventure; Númenóreans had kings and kingly stewards, but hobbits had scarcely any government at all.  Some Númenóreans -- certainly Faramir and Boromir -- had psychic or prophetic dreams, something the hobbits are never shown to have had.  The stereotypical hobbit was basically the opposite of the stereotypical Númenóreans; and we all know who were the stereotypical opposites of stereotypical Aryan superman.  Yet it was the hobbits who turned out to be the greatest heroes.

This, I think was the point.  Frodo was a "type" of Jew in the sense of Catholic typology, which is a kind of metaphorical foreshadowing.  For example, King David was a "type" of Jesus Christ because he was both a shepherd and a king, among other things; yet David was also his own person and only hinted at Christ, as opposed to C. S. Lewis's Aslan, who was supposed to be precisely Jesus Christ.  The date on which Frodo defeated Sauron -- March 25, which is traditionally believed to be the date of the creation, the Annunciation, and the Crucifixion, is also a very important clue.

So in essence, Tolkien was saying, "You want to believe you are taller, more talented, more psychic, and more adventurous?  Fine.  For the sake of argument, let's go with that.  It still remains true that the Most Important Person Who Ever Lived was one of those you wrongly consider your inferiors, even subhuman."

Of course that is not the only theme of The Lord of the Rings, which was never intended to be the same kind of simplistic book as The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, let alone Pilgrim's Progress, but the presence of this theme is enough to justify the inclusion of otherwise distasteful elements.  The tendency of fans of Tolkien to accept the "superiority" of the Númenóreans without batting an eye ... that remains disturbing.

Paging Nurse Ratched!

When the director of the CDC has declared racism a "serious public health threat", how long can it be before (non-voluntary) medical treatments are prescribed?

Don't worry.  NO WAY is this leading to a dystopian nightmare. 

Poetry and Sports

If you just walk up a green with a golf ball in your hand and casually place the ball in the hole, you are not playing a bold and original form of golf; you are not playing golf at all.  The rules of any sport are apt to be unnatural -- it would be natural to tuck the basketball under one's arm and run with it, or to grab a soccer ball with one's hands -- but it is precisely this that makes the sport a sport.

The same holds true with poetry.  Rhyme, meter, alliteration, etc. are all as arbitrary and unnatural as the rules of American football, and different languages and cultures have different rules, as of course do different sports.  However, just as the rules make the sport, the rules make the poetry.  "Poetry" without rules is not poetry at all; it is typically just prose with oddly placed dramatic pauses.

The Atonement and Gaius Mucius Scaevola

Over the years, many explanations have been put forward in an attempt to explain just why God chose to redeem us by a method as shocking as the Crucifixion.  Very likely the real answer is something of a mystery -- even five sorrowful mysteries -- that we can encounter and on which we can meditate even though we cannot comprehend it fully.  At any rate, care must be taken not to create the impression that the Crucifixion was some sort of generic "good example" or, worse, that the Father is some sort of bloodthirsty monster, both of which errors being far too commonly held.

I suggest that some insight can be gained by remembering the example of Gaius Mucius Scaevola and drawing a rough parallel.  The sacrifice of his right hand did not make the words of Gaius true, but they made them credible, which no lesser gesture could have done.

Now it cannot be said that God was unable to forgive us without the Crucifixion -- Hebrews 9:22 need not be understood as a limitation on the part of God.  But just as a sin, to be mortal (CCC 1857), must be grave, committed with full knowledge, and committed with full assent of the will, our redemption -- which is as grave as anything concerning us can be -- must be accepted with full knowledge and full consent of the will.  After all, Jesus came not merely to give us a kind of legal pardon, like we might imagine for a tree scheduled to be cut down, but to restore in us the likeness of God, and that requires knowledge, will, and goodness -- that we be transformed by the renewing of our minds, as Romans 12:2 says.

If, however, Jesus had merely come to say, "Be at peace; God forgives you, only stop sinning," we all know what would have happened.  Many people would have said, "Huh.  It appears sins are not really a very big deal after all," and they would have continued on as before.  This is the sin of presumption.  Others would have thought, "That only applies to people who have committed minor sins.  My sins are too enormous to be forgiven by mere words.  I am damned."  This is the sin of despair.  There would have been scant room for the virtue of faith.  Of course, the overwhelming majority of people would have paid no attention whatsoever, reasoning that talk is cheap.

Coming back to the parallel with Scaevola, it is the willing sacrifice that gives weight to the words.  We now know how seriously God takes all sins, even the ones we dismiss as peccadillos.  We now know that God is not merely forgiving peccadillos, but really horrible sins.  Talk may be cheap, but in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God; so the Word is of incomparable value.

Our need for salvation is grave, as it has been since the expulsion from Eden.  Due to the Passion, we now have enough knowledge.  Will we give the full consent of the will to repent?

Ecclesiastes and the Romance of Lost Causes

Every once in a while, I get in a blue funk for which the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible is a good antidote.  This might seem strange, since it is by no means a cheerful book.  Consider, for example, Ecclesiastes 2:9-11:

So I was great, and increased more than all that were before me in Jerusalem: also my wisdom remained with me. And whatsoever mine eyes desired I kept not from them, I withheld not my heart from any joy; for my heart rejoiced in all my labour: and this was my portion of all my labour. Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.

But the blue mood I referred to has less to do with any real suffering -- compared with a great many, probably the great majority both in history and today, I have no really valid complaints -- and more to do with the suspicion that I have stupidly lost opportunities that could have made me truly happy.  If only I had had the nerve to ask this girl out, or if my courtship of that other girl had been successful; if only I had chosen a different major in college, or had chosen a different career path after getting my degrees; if only I had taken a different job within my current career path; if only!  Then I would surely feel less vexation of spirit.  King Solomon answers me, "Don't worry about that, kid.  I had all the women, all the wealth, all the power, all the success, all the acclaim -- all the things that men strive for -- and it all turned to ashes in my mouth."  

This life is, as the Salve Regina reminds us, the Valley of Tears, neither Eden nor Heaven, and these worldly goals cannot change that.  It's not that different choices and outcomes are without consequence -- they do matter somewhat -- but they are not the One Thing Needful.

This year, it is easy to see people making the same mistake on a larger scale -- but hardly for the first time.  For ages Europeans have lamented, "If only the Roman Empire had not fallen!"  Over the years, this has been echoed in such cries as, "If only the Arabs had been crushed when they first burst out!"  "If only the Crusader states had lasted!"  "If only Constantinople had not fallen!"  As we come closer to the present age, the laments become more controversial.  "If only Europeans had not discovered the Americas!" "If only the Spanish Armada had succeeded!" "If only James II had remained in power!" "If only the French Revolution had not taken place!"  Closer to home:  "If only Stonewall Jackson had not doubled back and been shot by his own men!"  "If only Lincoln had survived to the end of his term!"  "If only America had joined the League of Nations!" And, of course, "If only Kennedy had not been assassinated, Camelot would have lasted, and JFK would have ushered America and the world into a utopia of peace and justice and love and joy and wisdom!"  Feel free to add your own; we all do.

Each of these examples were important to history.  Each of them caused at least some people to suffer.  Some of them, like the Kennedy assassination, were sudden and unforeseen, and could have been avoided by trivial circumstances; others, like the fall of Constantinople or the Crusader states, were long foreseen and could not have easily been prevented.  The point remains that whatever good may have come from changing these events would be a good subject to decay.

For example, there is a trope in science fiction about going back in time and killing Adolf Hitler before he came to power.  "If only he could have been removed from history, how much suffering could have been avoided!"  Maybe, but we will never know.  Hitler scarcely invented antisemitism, nor did he create the dissatisfaction with the end of the First World War, so the Nazi Party would still have come into existence, maybe under the leadership of Hermann Göring.  The alternative leader might have been more cautious, proceeding more slowly than Hitler did -- slowly enough, perhaps, to avoid alarming the public in the USA and UK, slowly enough to allow Germany and Italy to properly prepare for war, slowly enough for Germany to develop ballistic missiles (like the V-2 rocket) and jet fighters before the war even began, maybe even slowly enough for Germany to develop the atomic bomb.  What happened in real history was bad enough, but it could have been even worse.

Like Tantalus, we are tormented by seeming goods that we cannot actually attain.  Maybe this is part of our punishment; at any rate, it seems to be part of being human.  In the final analysis, though, all we really need to mourn are our sins, and we must remember that

all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

EDIT:  Reading this again, I see I switched back and forth between two different ideas.  The first is that worldly success is not enough to make us truly happy, even while we have it; the second is that worldly success is both incomplete and transient.  Ecclesiastes also makes the same two points, and although they are different (like the soul and the body) I think they are related (like the soul and the body).

EDIT 2:  Perhaps it really is "part of being human", since even Jesus engaged in it.  "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!" -- Matthew 23:37

EDIT 3:  Don't misunderstand my previous edit.  OF COURSE Jesus understands history better than we do, and He properly values historical events.  Jerusalem allowing God to gather her children together would not have been merely worldly, and it is PRECISELY what was needed to make them truly happy.  He does perfectly what we do poorly; but regretting what might have been still seems to be part of being human.

Life Sentences

In Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis called for the abolition of life sentences, as he had earlier called for the abolition of the death penalty.

• Each appeal was made not on the basis of the fear of God, nor on Christian charity, nor was either made on the basis of the justice, but rather on the "new appreciation" for human dignity.  Take away the title of pope, and no one would give such a lame argument a second look.  Human dignity comes only and entirely from our relationship with God -- our creation in His image (meaning we are more than merely material, being moral and spiritual as well), the Incarnation of God the Son in which He became man, and His sacrifice for us poor sinners.  Absent this relationship to God, human dignity is no more outstanding than chimpanzee dignity.
• As a Church teaching, none of these suggestions are proclamations of infallible doctrines.  Their staying power, then, will depend on how well they integrate into actually indispensable and trustworthy teachings, or at least into compelling logic.  So far, this does not look good.
• The practical effect of saying that even men like Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson should have been eventually freed is that fewer people will take his stance against the death penalty seriously.  It becomes very hard to accept that the Pope actually believes that justice is a real, spiritual good towards which we should work, softening it through forgiveness rather than laxity.  It becomes hard to believe he really accepts, "But I say to you, that whosoever is angry with his brother, shall be in danger of the judgment. And whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca, shall be in danger of the council. And whosoever shall say, Thou Fool, shall be in danger of hell fire," when he also seems to believe, "But whosoever shall rape a boy, and murder him, and cannibalize him, shall be subject to 10 years, tops, in a prison that treats him well and respects his dignity."  Finally, it becomes clear that the safety of the law-abiding public is a very low priority for Pope Francis. 
  

It takes more than the bare minimum.

On September 19, 2020, Andrew McCarthy wrote in "Replacing Justice Ginsburg: Politics, Not Precedent" at National Review Online the following.

It is ridiculous for leading senators, administration officials, influential partisans, and pundits to enunciate the high-minded principles and precedents that supposedly control the propriety and timing of a nomination.

In reality, there are only two rules, both set forth in the Constitution: A president, for as long as he or she is president, has the power to nominate a person to fill a Supreme Court seat; and that nominee can fill the seat only with the advice and consent of the Senate. That’s it. Everything else is posturing. Everything else is politics.

Of course, it is true that the Constitution does not require the president, or anyone else for that matter, to be courteous.  Nor does it require him to be persuasive, or industrious, or wise, or even well-intentioned.  Then again, the Constitution does not guarantee that the president's term will be successful or good for the country, nor that Republic will endure, nor that the endurance of the Republic would be a good thing that ought to be desired.  The Founding Fathers knew that it takes more than a bare minimum to give civilization, let alone democracy, a chance of success, but they also knew it was hopeless to enumerate in detail all that is necessary:  there is too much to say, for one thing, and it is unnecessary except for fools and scoundrels, who would at any rate dismiss it -- for instance, by saying it is mere posturing.

This is not about the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to succeed Ruth Bader Ginsburg; I very much hope Judge Barrett is confirmed.  But for at least my whole life, presidents, along with "leading senators, administration officials, influential partisans, and pundits" have done their Machiavellian best to cast off all restraints to their power, ignoring law, tradition, ethics, and the Constitution when they could, and giving perverse interpretations to them when they could not completely ignore the restraints.  In the long run, the attitude expressed by Andrew McCarthy is a more serious problem than any one seat on the Supreme Court.

Why I Can No Longer Call Myself "Conservative", Updated

Suppose a self-appointed Conservative "leader" consistently labeled homosexual activity, and the whole subculture as wrong, but always with a "wink, wink; nudge, nudge; say no more" attitude that reassures his readers that he is not one of those nasty people who actually believe it is really wrong, but that he is obliged by his position to sorta kinda condemn it a little.  Suppose that this same "leader" has been unsparing in his criticism of Trump, but would have us believe that Biden is a well-meaning old man who could not be blamed for the actions his administration and party would likely take were he to be elected, to say nothing of his record in office over the past several decades.  Likewise, this "Conservative leader" wants us to know what a fine, praiseworthy woman Ruth Bader Ginsburg was, consequences for the unborn be damned.

You might then reasonably conclude that the word "Conservative" did not mean much to this person, except perhaps a meal ticket.

Now step back and consider:  although I have one particular person in mind, you could really put the names of all the prominent "Conservatives" over the past three decades into a hat, draw one name at random, and there is a good chance the description above applies to the owner of that name, too.

Seven years ago I said that I could not call myself a Conservative because that label carries too many connotations.  That remains true.  It is interesting, though, that the same label also carries too little meaning.

The Eyes of Others

This is a response to a posting on Rod Dreher's blog at The American Conservative, which begins as follows.

If you could live out one of these alter egos for two weeks, experiencing the world through their eyes, which do you think would bring you the most useful new understanding of the world:

1. the opposite sex
2. a different race
3. someone from a non-WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) country [or, for my readers who live in a non-WEIRD country, a WEIRD one]?

This post illustrates an error that is disturbingly common today, even among people who should know better:  the error that our bodies are superficial "shells" that are as external to our being and as interchangeable as clothes.  This is not the Christian teaching, which is that the body is on integral part of any human being -- which is why we do not become angels after we die, we await (hopefully in Heaven!) the General Resurrection which will reunite our souls with our bodies.  This also is also important to understand the Incarnation and the Resurrection of Jesus:  He did not take on human nature for a mere thirty-something years, but forevermore.  No, this is the sort of thing one would expect from a Gnostic, a Buddhist, or a Hindu.

We can imagine being all manner of things that we are not and cannot become, like a different race or sex, as Dreher suggests; but we cannot actually become those other things, and therefore we cannot genuinely see things from their perspectives.  It is not enough to experience the same circumstances.  A person's perspective also comes from his or her strengths and weaknesses, his or her world view and philosophical framework, his or her body of previous experiences, and it is not ultimately possible to share all these without actually being that other person; but we cannot be that person without ceasing to be ourselves.  

Meanwhile, it is dangerous to treat our imaginations as though they were actual data.  Seriously, think back to how you imagined some major change in your life would be -- going off to college, a developing romance, a move to a new city, a new job, etc.  Now think how different the actual experiences were from what you had imagined.  If you have such difficulty imagining yourself in slightly different circumstances, how much should you trust your imagination of being a different person?

Sadly, this is par for the course with Dreher and The American Conservative.

EDIT:  A valid objection would be that all Dreher is asking for is imagination, and one of the purposes of imagination is to consider what we cannot directly experience.  For example, we can start with the assumption that there is a largest prime number and show that that assumption leads to a contradiction.  It is hard to see how such reasoning could be applied to a man imagining he is a woman, though; contradiction would only tell him that he is not a woman, which he hopefully already knew.  In fact, it is only the reasoning after the assumption of a largest prime number that makes the assumption useful.  Dreher's suggestion, though, is really imagination for the sake of imagination, not imagination for the sake of reason.  In the middle of Weirdmageddon, when most of the world is trapped in Mabel's wish-fulfillment prison, what we really need is more reason, not more imagination.  

EDIT 2:  I mean, come on!  This is clearly Portland in 2020.

Hope

"And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity."

1 Corinthians 13:13 refers of course to the theological virtues, but the hope I want to talk about here is not the theological virtue, but what I might call its shadow on the secular plane.  This hope is not the same thing as optimism.  Suppose, for example, a man sees a plane crash.  Pessimism might keep him from running to the crash site, because it would make him assume the worst; pessimism is the projection of the vice of despair on the secular plane.  Optimism might also keep him from running to the crash site, because it would make him assume everybody is OK; optimism is the projection of the vice of presumption on the secular plane.  Hope sends a man running to crash site knowing that it might be bad, but hoping it is not so bad as to be beyond all help.  Hope is not ignorance nor a refusal to face reality; it is the determination to do one's best even though it may take circumstances beyond our knowledge or control to achieve the desired result.

Hope has sent countless immigrants to America, each wanting a better future for himself and his children.  Hope sent settlers to the west, knowing that the farm or ranch  would never achieve its full potential in their lifetimes but that with enough time and effort, it might support many generations in the future.  Hope sent men in debt or in trouble with the law to the frontier where the sought to escape their past mistakes and re-invent themselves.

Democracy is bound up in hope -- the hope that the best solutions for problems will emerge and be accepted by the majority of the population if free and open debate is allowed, the hope that the majority of citizens will put the common good above their narrow, personal interests, the hope that the divisions of the past do not condemn us to endless conflict against each other.

The USA is so closely tied to the virtue of hope that it is arguably the special vocation of America to exemplify hope; yet today America has given up on hope.  We no longer believe in free speech or democracy.  We no longer love the prospective children of our prospective children enough to sacrifice for them.  Sin increases not because we are more strongly tempted than previous generations, but because we no longer hope to resist sin.  We still feel guilty, of course, which is why we are so anxious to slander all our ancestors; it is the only way left to feel we have accomplished something, or at least that no one remains who has the right to disapprove of our choices.

The USA was never held together by a common ethnicity or a common religion; it was only held together by this common vocation.  Now that that has been definitively rejected, the USA as we have known it is in its death throes.  Oh, the names and titles may be recycled, but they will no longer mean the same things.

Religion in General

For a long time I have been seriously annoyed by people who think religious believers should defend religion in general, or religion in the abstract.  Often this is initiated by atheists, and from their perspective this makes sense, both because they believe all religion is false and because it works as a tactic to make their debate opponents defend absurd positions.  It is much less excusable, though, for believers to internalize this way of thinking.  It is much less excusable, yet it is commonly encountered.

In most areas of life, this kind of confusion is not tolerated.  We do not, for instance, expect the makers of a serious anti-cancer drug to defend "cancer treatments" in general -- and by "in general", I mean everything marketed as a cancer treatment on the Internet.  If you think major drug companies are (at least sort of) honest, this can be because the Internet is full not only of "treatments" that are useless, but of "treatments" that are directly harmful; if you think they are not even marginally honest, this can be because they have no incentive to defend their competitors; but either way, no one expects pharmaceutical companies to defend every purported treatment.  Nor should we expect those who claim to have the cure for spiritual sickness to defend every purported spiritual cure.

And yet we do.  Why?

Certainly one reason is the Scandal of Particularity.  Our culture and our time is particularly offended by this scandal.  The cultural impact comes largely from developments in science.  Copernicus (and his immediate successors) showed that the solar system can be greatly simplified if we consider the sun its center rather than the earth.  (Note:  In the ancient and medieval interpretation, the earth was better described as being at the BOTTOM of the universe than at its CENTER, so its unique status was not exactly a compliment.)  Darwin argued convincingly that there is no sharp BIOLOGICAL distinction between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.  Einstein authored a compelling theory that nature does not favor any one frame of reference.  All these ideas -- which are supported by reams of observational and experimental data -- seemed to reinforce the idea that no place or species is really better or more important than any other (but it is extremely important to understand that that is reading a deeper meaning into the science than science itself can bear).  History seems to back this up, as it becomes clear that there never really was a golden age, our childhood heroes were more flawed than we had imagined them, and people just like us have committed shocking atrocities.  Consequently, a rejection of the particular in favor of the general is an inescapable part of the Zeitgeist.

But then, the Zeitgeist is by definition a feature von unserer Zeit -- of our time.  It is also largely confined to what has usually been called Western civilization.  There is a degree of irony in passionately asserting that we live in a very special time and place, otherwise we would not realize there is no such thing as a special time or place.  Even setting that aside, the Scandal of Particularity is an example of a logical fallacy:  the rash generalization.

And the fact is, we need particularity.  What is real is a particular case of what might have been, and, contrary to what the Walt Disney Corporation would have us believe, reality is better than fantasy.  The West is dying because it has rejected this truth.

Monuments

We have known for millennia that there is power even in a mere list of names.  There are, after all, lessons to be learned from the genealogies of the first chapter of the Gospel According to St. Matthew and the third chapter of the Gospel According to St. Luke.  Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, David, and Solomon are all prominent for their virtues -- and for their flaws.  Even King Manasseh, who is probably best known as the idolater who (likely) had the Prophet Isaiah sawed in two, converted after he was carried off to Babylon, and a penitential prayer attributed to him is a part of the Church's liturgy to this day.  What is more, even Queen Jezebel, about whom little good can be said, was in the ancestry of Jesus, since her daughter Athaliah married King Jehoram of Judah and was the mother of King Ahaziah.  One moral of all these stories is, perhaps, that there is some good and some bad in each of our histories; this is the condition of the human race that Christ came to save.  This lesson only exists, though, because so many names and stories have been remembered, rather than being conveniently hidden and forgotten.

More recently, lists of names have been used to commemorate the victims of crimes and tragedies.  It is easy to find readings of the names of those killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, in the 9/11 terror attacks, in the Vegas shooting spree, in the Boston Marathon bombing, in the shoot-down of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17, in the Dayton mass shooting, in the Charleston church shooting, etc.  Perhaps the most famous such list of names is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which, its name not withstanding, primarily honors those who died in that controversial and divisive war, not those who returned to live as veterans.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is not literally a gravestone, but it is something similar to the Cenotaph World War I memorial in London -- something like a tombstone much farther than normal six feet from the actual mortal remains.  And it still seems to be understood -- or at least it was understood not long ago -- that only a real creep desecrates graves; thus when Jewish graves were vandalized in 2017 in Philadelphia and St. Louis, it was rightly expected that everyone would be outraged -- whether or not one agrees with their religion or shares their ethnicity.  If we owe the benefit of the doubt to those who are still alive and able to defend their reputations, we all the more owe it to the dead.

It is within this context that you should be able to understand my reaction to the decision of the current administration of the University of Alabama to remove the monuments shown below.

A university is a kind of family, so this is something like seeing that your first cousin's son, whom you barely know, has kicked over your grandmother's tombstone to win the approval of his bratty friends, that he has posted a video of it online, and that the video shows him doing it in a smug, self-righteous, and self-congratulatory way.  The familial relationship remains, but it makes the offense all the greater.  No matter what happens afterwards, the offense will be remembered, and there will be AT LEAST a scar remaining on the relationship.  At the bare minimum, you would not be cheering the kid on at his upcoming football games.  That grave marker he made such a show of kicking over would mean more to you than all his sports trophies put together.