At Carolina Journal, Andre Beliveau clearly articulates the case for a free-market component to conservatism, something that was taken as a given until a weird new notion of what conservatism is, or should be, infected the body politic:
The government should protect the space for capitalism to flourish, not engage as a venture capital firm. It should protect the public from unjustified and mischievous monopolies, not become one. The market should decide winners and losers in the private sector, not the government. The right using the power of the state to suppress woke corporations creates a dangerous precedent for when the pendulum of power shifts and the left sees it as part of the “common good” to suppress Christian small business owners.
Principles must prevail over partisanship and power.
We are in a serious cultural battle against the woke left; there is no denying it. However, conservatives have long known that these cultural battles are only won when virtue is self-actuated and chosen, not coerced and forced. Persuasion and evangelizing are our means, not the strong arm of the state. Virtue requires one to embrace it fully within their heart. Like Burke’s “little platoons,” we best do this locally and within our cultural institutions, especially in our families, neighborhoods, churches, and community organizations.
Economic freedom works much in the same way. Just as we cannot experience, as a citizenry, authentic virtue when it is coercive, we cannot experience true economic freedom when it is coerced through central planning.
We all pretty much knew this, but The Hill provides some data to support the observation that "Teens Are Spending Less Time Than Ever With Friends":
The nation’s teens have traded face time for Facetime. Adolescents are spending less time gathering in shopping malls, movie theaters and rec rooms, and more time connecting on Instagram, TikTok and Discord.
Some researchers see the retreat from social gatherings as key to explaining the wave of adolescent ennui that is sweeping the nation. Numerous studies have tracked rising rates of loneliness among adolescents before, during and since the COVID-19 pandemic. Last month, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declared a national loneliness epidemic. And loneliness presages depression and other mental health maladies, which are also growing more prevalent among teens.
“Teens are spending a lot more time communicating with each other electronically and a lot less time hanging out with each other face to face,” said Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University and author of “Generations,” a new book about generational differences.
“Going to the mall has gone down. Driving in the car for fun has gone down. Going to the movies has gone down,” she said. “We’re talking about kids who are spending five, six, seven hours a day on social media.”
Public Discourse is running a series on fidelity, and installments have included essays on marital fidelity and fidelity to place, but the series began with this piece by Andrew T. Walker of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary on fidelity to God:
Now, more than ever, we must assert that infidelity to God is what plagues Western man and that what stands as his greatest need is fidelity and right relationship to Him. Without that sure foundation provided by a divine guarantor, the value, responsibilities, and duties that attend to individuals are mere contrivances; they need to be secured to a divine ontology not subject to the vicissitudes of human passions. In other words, Christianity provides the social order with what someone like the non-Christian political theorist Vàclav Havel longed for but could not find—a “Cosmic Anchoring,” a foundation that orders existence, something that political orders hostile to God cannot supply on their own. Christian anthropology, and its emphasis on the human person bearing God’s image, forever changed the equation for the significance of the individual—the human became definitively suffused with moral meaning. With Christianity, as historian Larry Siedentop writes, “Individual agency acquires roots in divine agency.”
We must know God to know our relationship to our family, to our community, and our nation. Nothing made, including the virtues of political community, can be fully understood apart from their ultimate foundation in God. Individuals need God. So do the nations. Democratic virtues that we take for granted as necessary to the American project—among them respect for human dignity, human rights, and the rule of law—all find their origins in Christianity. Outside of Christianity, each concept exists as a vapor hanging in thin air.
Chloe Cole sets the record straight at Reality's Last Stand, a Substack focused on the madness of gender ideology:
Yesterday, New York Times reporter Maggie Astor published a hit piece about me in an attempt to undermine my story and the testimonies of other detransitioners. Now that I’ve had some time to process everything more completely, I’d like to address some of the inaccuracies and falsehoods that Astor wrote about me—beginning with the disingenuous title, “How a Few Stories of Regret Fuel the Push to Restrict Gender Transition Care.”
I take issue with Astor’s flagrant use of the word “regret,” which implies a benign mistake like a bad tattoo—something I wasn’t even allowed to get until I turned 18 last year. No, I was a child when I was misinformed and misled by adults, who convinced me to permanently alter my body.
I learned through social media when I was 11 about boys and girls being trapped in the “wrong body”—an impossibility that should never have been “affirmed” by doctors. I was told by health professionals whom I trusted that I had a medical condition that required medical treatment. Not only that, but my parents were emotionally manipulated by being presented with a false dilemma—“would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?”—despite the fact that suicidality is routinely overexaggerated in trans-identified youth.
Astor relies on the euphemism “transition care” when she means “chemical and surgical sex change services.” This is neither medically necessary nor lifesaving, but rather elective, cosmetic, and experimental.
Astor also flipplantly refers to my detransition as “changing course,” implying I merely took a wrong turn instead of having doctors affirm my confusion with experimental medicine. She says I “returned to my female identity,” but being female is not an identity. It is a biological reality that describes half the human population. It is something I never stopped being despite the fact that when I was 13-15, doctors prescribed me puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgically removed my breasts to try to mold me into something that superficially resembled a boy.
Astor neglects to mention the vocal European detransitioners and how European medical societies have backed off of “gender-affirming care” after conducting systematic reviews of evidence and finding that the risks outweigh any purported benefits. She also referred to outdated statistics on detransition which include studies on adults rather than the cohort I belong to—adolescents under the “gender-affirming” model of care. These studies also had serious methodological flaws and a high loss to follow up rate.
Another statistic she likely referenced was from a study about detransitioners that specifically excluded detransitioners. Participation in the study was limited only to those who had detransitioned in the past but still identified as trans–in other words, not people like me.
At Ordinary Times, Ben Sears ponders the challenges of translating great poems:
When I first decided to write a weekly series about poets and poetry I mapped out what I wanted to do and set a few parameters. One of the first rules was that there would be no translations. I’ve broken that rule a few times but I didn’t want to be caught in a situation where I was unsure if I enjoyed the work of the poet, the translator, or the combination. When I read Pound’s Cathay, or more specifically when I read about how Pound’s Cathay came to be, my conception of translations changed.
In my mind, a poet dusted off an old manuscript in a language he’d fluency in and transcribed literally, going back with a bag of synonyms in hand making changes necessary to reflect the original’s rhythm and rhyme. Admittedly simplistic, I know.
The reality is a mess. There are faithful scribes like I imagined them all to be, but there are also Robert Lowells. He called his translations “Impressions” and took the sense of what he read and wrote almost original works. Pound has been accused of playing ventriloquist with various foreign poets. Elizabeth Bishop translated the poems of Carlos Drummond de Andrade from Portuguese. She was his first English translator and responsible for his popularity in the that-speaking world. Said Bishop, “I didn’t know him at all. He’s supposed to be very shy. I’m supposed to be very shy. We’ve met once—on the sidewalk at night. We had just come out of the same restaurant, and he kissed my hand politely when we were introduced.” Though they both lived in the state of Rio de Janeiro she never called for direction. There’s more expression in translation than I assumed.
As I wrote, it’s a mess. The more I look into it, the more convinced I become of the wisdom I displayed in the parameter setting stage, but it’s really interesting. Looking into the whys and wherefores of how a translation came about fascinates me enough that I’m revoking the prohibition. Let chaos reign. When considering translations, I’ll write about poets rather than poet.
Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an epic poem containing some two hundred and fifty plus myths, is one of the most important works to come down to us from antiussle quity, at least as far as we can be sure it did. There are pieces dated as far back as the 9th century but the earliest known complete manuscript has been dated to the 11th century, so we may be dealing with a game of telephone – albeit one tempered by comparison to Ovid’s other surviving works – to begin with. What is mentioned in almost every commentary I’ve come across is the depth of Ovid’s wit. I’ve discussed the vagaries of poetic wit and how the word has changed over time in regard to poetry at this site before but I don’t think we need to get into that other than to say that there is a quality of Ovid’s that Latin scholars agree exists in his entire original. It doesn’t sound like much, but the preservation of an original calling card is a handy barometer, hinting to us whether or not the translator intended to let the dead man speak or if he, as Pound occasionally did, played ventriloquist.
I've been productive over at Precipice. Here are some recent pieces:
"Substitutes for Reality" looks at the fatal delusions each of America's two major political parties embrace.
"This Isn't Just A Tussle Between Human Constructs" deals with the spiritual dimension of the latest metastasizing of identity politics militancy:
That’s what all this talk of “community” and “allies” is really all about. People with unorthodox notions of human sexuality find validation for forms of identity that they’ve made up out of whole cloth. And it helps them to see themselves as a cohesive group to juxtapose themselves against a perceived power structure - you know, patriarchal, cisheteronormative, white, Judeo-Christian institutions - and raise their fists against it.
But on what basis are they going to find a sense of belonging in a deep, rich sense that will sustain them the way families have sustained people throughout times of travail and real danger? On what basis are human beings going to construct viable societies under this new arrangement?
"I'm Thinking Maybe We Should Just Let The Trumpists Have The Term 'Conservative' Since They've Defiled It So Badly" has a pretty self-explanatory title, but looks at how ideological labels have evolved over the past couple of centuries:
deological labels don’t tell us much anymore. For a while, in the middle of the twentieth century, juxtaposing “liberal” and “conservative” served us well in establishing a spectrum one side of which was instinctively drawn to collectivist approaches to societal problem-solving, and the other emphasizing individual sovereignty. But even those applications of those terms was a distortion.
A classical liberal, in the nineteenth century, was someone who took to heart what Adam Smith and Frederic Bastiat had had to say about how the free market was organic and spontaneous - that is, unplanned - and therefore the economic arrangement most conducive to freedom in human life’s other realms. As the twentieth century got underway, and Austrian-School thinkers such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek refined that strain of inquiry, they were deemed classical liberals as well.
Twentieth-century conservatism embraced the classical liberals, but also looked to the eighteenth century’s Edmund Burke as the father of a strain that upheld hierarchy and tradition. He hoped against hope that the king would act like a wise monarch and not an impulsive tyrant. He hated slavery and wanted to see it ended, and thought the way to assimilate freed slaves into the Western societies in which they found themselves was to make sure they got a good grounding in Christianity. This strain was developed by thinkers such as Richard M. Weaver and Russell Kirk.
These two strains were joined by a concern about totalitarian collectivism as that became a threat to both tradition and freedom unique to the modern era.
All of this was converging, and Frank S. Meyer, one of the original editors of National Review, proposed what he called fusionism as a way for adherents of these strains to not only work together, but do so guided by a coherent view of what made human life valuable.
It’s not as if the conservatism that has come to serve as shorthand for opposition to the collectivism and the disdain for tradition on the left popped onto the scene fully formed. All this took a great deal of hammering out, and ill-fitting movements that wanted in on the action, such as Ayn Rand and the Objectivists and the John Birch Society, had to be shown the door.
Conservatism enjoyed a swelling of the ranks as formerly left-leaning figures at journals such as Commentary and Partisan Review crossed the spectrum’s center line. This roughly coincided with the rise of Ronald Reagan on the political level.
I used to try to reduce conservatism to the three pillars of fusionism / Reaganism - free-market economics, an understanding of why Western civilization has been a unique blessing to humankind, and resolute resistance to world-stage forces unfriendly to the first two - but now I don’t know that such bullet-point framing does it justice.
How’s this for a workable foundation on which to build a definition? Conservatism is concerned with that which is immutable and transcendent. It is preoccupied with the higher things enumerated in the excerpt above - beauty, nobility, loyalty, humility, wisdom - but also things that the Left has claimed it champions as well: fairness, connectedness, deliverance of society’s lower rungs from lives of drudgery and discomfort.
There. That should keep you out of trouble on this (finally!) rainy June Sunday.
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