On Buckley

Since Bill Buckley's death, I've come across a number of moving tributes to his life and work. Here's Peggy Noonan:

“I thought it beautiful and inspiring that he was open to, eager for, friendships from all sides, that even though he cared passionately about political questions, politics was not all, cannot be all, that people can be liked for their essence, for their humor and good nature and intelligence, for their attitude toward life itself. He and his wife, Pat, were friends with lefties and righties, from National Review to the Paris Review. It was moving too that his interests were so broad, that he could go from an appreciation of the metaphors of Norman Mailer to essays on classical music to an extended debate with his beloved friend the actor David Niven on the best brands of peanut butters. When I saw him last he was in a conversation with the historian Paul Johnson on the relative merits of the work of the artist Raeburn.

“His broad-gaugedness, his refusal to be limited, seemed to me a reflection in part of a central conservative tenet, as famously expressed by Samuel Johnson. ‘How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.’ When you have it right about laws and kings, and what life is, then your politics become grounded in the facts of life. And once they are grounded, you don't have to hold to them so desperately. You can relax and have fun. Just because you're serious doesn't mean you're grim.”

There are numerous other tributes, and they aren't hard to find. And one comes to the conclusion that William F. Buckley was a good man, in a very full sense. Of course, he was wrong about various things at various times, and sometimes dreadfully so — one tactless writer at Slate dug up an old column that Buckley wrote in support of segregationists — but, of course, nobody really begins as a good person. We have to grow into it, subjecting our impulses and opinions to something outside of ourselves. For Buckley, it seems that his Catholicism turned his mind towards higher things.

Not that religion is the only thing that can do this; ordinary compassion can point you in the right direction. But once one's transcendental (non-selfish) orientation gives that direction, what guarantees the ability to move in a new direction? The grace of a savior, as Mr. Buckley might have reminded us.

I'll leave off with one more passage, from Joe Sobran via Rod Dreher:

“Over the years I came to know another side of Bill. When I had serious troubles, he was a generous friend who did everything he could to help me without being asked. And I wasn’t the only one. I gradually learned of many others he’d quietly rescued from adversity. He’d supported a once-noted libertarian in his destitute old age, when others had forgotten him… I once spent a long evening with one of Bill’s old friends from Yale, whose name I won’t mention. He told me movingly how Bill stayed with him to comfort him when his little girl died of brain cancer. If Bill was your friend, he’d share your suffering when others just couldn’t bear to. What a great heart — eager to spread joy, and ready to share grief!

“Compared with all this, the political differences that finally drove us apart seem trivial now. I saw the same graciousness in his relations with everyone from presidents to menials. I learned a lot of things from Bill Buckley, but the best thing he taught me was how to be a Christian. May Jesus comfort him now.”

Funny New Math

From Andrew Sullivan, via Hodgman:

(garfield) - (garfield) = (actually funny)

Thank you, the internet, for showing us that there can be redemption for even the worst of daily comic strips.

Spengler gets out of hand.

Everyone knows that Barack Obama loves his country. What this essay presupposes is… maybe he doesn't?

I enjoy reading Spengler. But I think he was wrong about Rowan Williams, and I strongly doubt that he's right about Senator Obama. This essay is nothing but dirty, but, as Spengler explained in his forum, a candidate who runs on personality makes himself a target for personal attack.

Yet there exists a compelling explanation for the “emptiness” of Obamamania: the more a politician can avoid making promises during primary season, the easier it will be for that politician to swing towards the center in the main race.

John McCain will have plenty of time to make sure that Obama isn't a scary con man as soon as the primaries are done. Having said this, I'm going to get back to trying to avoid politics for the next nine months, unless some massive pro-parliamentary party appears to save us.

Back to Babylon?

Although it's not a blog that I read regularly, I found an interesting post on Inhabitatio Dei, entitled “Does Protestantism Exist?” It asks some questions that I've been asking myself, and answers them in a manner with which I have been toying.

“To be a protestant is to be situated in a particular historical stream of the Christian faith. To be a protestant, if that term is to have any real meaning at all, is to live one’s ecclesial life precariously, in essential vulnerability while attempting to call for radical reform of the Roman Catholic church. There can be no severing of the churches of the Reformation from the Roman Catholic church. We cannot think of the heritage of the Reformation in abstraction from the Roman Catholic church. If protestantism can be truly said to exist, it most exist as an ongoing form of engagement with the Roman Catholic church for the sake of the proper embodiment of the gospel.

“However, if protestantism has ceased to be such a form of ongoing engagement with the Roman Catholic church calling for reformation, then protestantism as such seems to have ceased to exist and something altogether different has come into being. Insofar as protestant churches have ceased to see their particularly protestant identity as qualified by historical connection to the Roman Catholic church they have ceased to be protestant. So, the question I have is, does protestantism exist, and if so, where?”

I'm no historian of theology, but it seems that now is a great time to think very hard about this question. Of course, there's no denomination that goes by the name “protestant”: we're all Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Anglicans, etc., and as such we have our own theological traditions. For a time, the culture of the United States was saturated with these traditions, but the flavor is weaker now, and becoming more so. (One could conceivably argue that much of this cultural protestantism was vaguely heretical anyway…)

And so it is important for young protestants than to find out who we are, and precisely what it is that we are charged to carry forward through history.

“Ljubljana!”

The Society for the Promotion of Folly: Sign me up!

I'm really sorry, but I thought you should read this.

Found on Millinerd's blog:

This vastly entertaining blog is sort of like the Chapelle show, but less outrageous and about White People. Not all white people: basically, just the ones who like the Arcade Fire and shop at Whole Foods. The culture posts hit very close to home:

Wes Anderson Movies: “If a white guy takes a white girl to a Wes Anderson movie on their first date, and neither of them have seen it, they will immediately commence a relationship that is reflected in songs by Ryan Adams and Bright Eyes.”

Not Having a TV: “The number one reason why white people like not having a TV is so that they can tell you that they don’t have a TV.”

Arrested Development: “They also love it because there are a few references to white popular culture, and if there is one thing that white people love, it’s cultural references that they understand (see Garden State, The Onion, and Juno for examples).”

Indie Music: “To a white person, being a fan of a band before they get popular is one of the most important things they can do with their life. They can hold it over their friends forever!”

Apologies: “In fact, white people are so used to apologizing that they start all sentences that might cause disagreement with ‘I’m sorry.’ For example ‘I’m sorry, but Garden State was a better film than Hard Eight.’”

Standing Still at Concerts: “Remember, at a concert everyone is watching you just waiting for you to try to start dancing. Then they will make fun of you. The result is Belle and Sebastian concerts that essentially looks more like a disorganized line of people than a music event.”

The site mostly takes aim at the slightly sub-hipster folks who regard themselves as paragons of open-mindedness, global thinking, and ironic fashion. Of course, irony returns in this manner: I'm guessing that those very people provided a clear majority of the blog's nearly three million hits.

I say “those people”: clearly I am distancing myself from that crowd. In a number of ways, I hardly fit the bill. I don't drink coffee, consider myself spiritual-but-not-religious (i.e. I'm openly religous) read David Sedaris, do yoga, or have difficult breakups. And while most of my friends fit into some category on this list, it still seems blog describes a very small demographic. I thank God that I don't fit this stereotype to a greater degree, and I mean that literally: when I don't fit something on the list, it has to do with my membership in a certain Christian community. As Matthew Millener says:

“While the mockery (let's face it) is earned, how does one escape the scourge? The site, it seems to me, has a lot to do with what we white people - indeed, any people - become when we lose the gospel - that most reliable tool for relentless self-criticism, that trusty crowbar for prying oneself from the world.”

But I'll certainly think twice before talking about my Apple products or my Netflix queue in the near future.

I will live in someplace very cold…

There was snow falling when I woke up this morning. Much has been said in many places about the character and effect of city snow, so I won't try to describe it. But I think that at this point in the afternoon, the snow is turning to rain, and the air is warm enough that watery slush is now plopping down off the tall buildings. Sometimes it seems like all the magic left in this world is of the sputtering, fitful, and ultimately inadequate variety.

Goatees

John Hodgman is exactly right:

“…the goatee is the facial hair of the desperately ambivalent…”

And:

“The Potts Famous Beard Manual indicates that a GOATEE signifies ‘false hopes’ and ‘flash over substance.’”

Click through to see how this relates to election season.

Nine Stitches

Went out to the hills with friends this weekend, wandered back into the woods, slipped on ice, dripped red blood all over the nice white snow, and ended up with stitches over my right eyebrow. Now I look like a goon, and I very much hope that the swelling goes down before class tomorrow.

My friend Brendan (who is quite a talented writer) is making his way through the novels of Robertson Davies, and he seems to be enjoying them as much as I did. Our conversations this weekend reminded me of the ways in which Mr. Davies's books changed the course of my thinking. Here's to a writer with a real vision of the deep comedy in the world, and to my favorite of his characters: poor Hector Mackilwraith.

"Beauty is the true form of distance."

So I'm stumbling on through David Bentley Hart's The Beauty of the Infinite, a work that I am only able to grasp by impressions, when I can grasp it at all. The first part is all about the narratives of the sublime in continental philosophy, from Kant and Nietzsche on up to Derrida, Deleuze, Foucalt, and Levinas. What is it that keeps me trudging through these wild grasses looming so high over my head?

Well, the prose is splendid. And when I cheat ahead with the index, I find sentences such as this:

“Bach is the greatest of Christian theologians, the most inspired witness to the ordo amoris in the fabric of being; not only is there no other composer capable of more freely developing lines or of more elaborate structures of tonal mediation (wheresoever the line goes, Bach is there also), but no one as compellingly demonstrates that the infinite is beauty and that beauty is infinite.”

Poor, poor Archbishop!

It's gloomy and dismal in New York right now, but I take comfort in the fact that I am not Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. You'd think that being the head of the worldwide Anglican Communion would be something of a cushy job, but that's just not the case, certainly not now, with the American Episcopal church and the conservative African bishops at each others' throats. I'm sure that Archbishop Williams, a theologian and poet, doesn't want to go down in history as the man who let the Anglican church fall apart, but it looks like it might happen. So when things get bad, I think to myself: at least I'm not the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Then, last week, in a speech and a BBC interview, Rowan Williams allegedly proposed “constructive accommodation” for Muslim communities in Britain who wish to use Sharia law. At least that's how the New York Times reported it. But at least the Times reporter added this:

“The archbishop’s speech was made at the Royal Courts of Justice, before an audience of leading judges and lawyers. Typically, it was steeped in historical and philosophical nuances that risked being lost in the headlines.”

It seems that other newspapers were not so kind. There were calls for resignation. There was a delightful Chaucer spoof (“Whan in Februar, withe hise global warmynge / Midst unseasonabyl rain and stormynge…”). Spengler was vividly critical:

“Violence is oozing through the cracks of European society like pus out of a broken scab. Just when liberal opinion congratulated itself that Europe had forsaken its violent past, the specter of civil violence has the continent terrified. That is the source of the uproar over a February 7 speech by Archbishop Rowan Williams, predicting the inevitable acceptance of Muslim sharia law in Great Britain.”

I'll admit a cynical thought that crossed my mind: the Archbishop is trying to lose his job! He wants to get kicked out for something that doesn't have to do with gay bishops! But then I read the speech. Philosophical nuances indeed.

I wonder if the Archbishop could have made the same point using a less controversial example. His basic point seems to be that if the law treats religious duties as voluntary, it can't make sense of the claims of religious people for exceptions: religious holidays, conditions for employment, etc. There is, I think, an implicit condition running through the entire speech: if certain people are duty-bound to abide by religious law, and this does not bring them into serious conflict with the spirit of the national law, and religious authorities can tell the court that these obligations aren't frivolous or imaginary, then the courts should take these obligations seriously. A judge could distinguish, for example, between a Catholic doctor who won't perform an abortion, even to save a life, and a Catholic doctor who won't perform a tracheotomy, even to save a life.

Williams wanted to avoid the difficulties of the “primitivist” reading of Sharia in order to focus on the theoretical aspects of law and communal identity. It's right there in the beginning:

“Even when some of the more dramatic fears are set aside, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about what degree of accommodation the law of the land can and should give to minority communities with their own strongly entrenched legal and moral codes.” (emphasis added)

To which one could conceivably respond: what if in reality these dramatic fears are entirely justified? (This question is, of course, not one that I can answer.)

In the BBC interview, Williams seems very confident that there exists an interpretation of Sharia law that is largely compatible with the British common law tradition, citing Muslim scholars and legal theorists. But what of the situation on the ground? I don't know anything about religious life in Great Britain, and I don't think I learned anything from this speech.

I am so glad that I am not the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Culture, culture, culture...

My good friend Hope has requested that I resume posting, so I'll give it another shot, assuming that I can think of anything to say (and that I can finish learning how to type in DVORAK).

I love very much the old fellows over at Touchstone's Mere Comments, and never more than when they get cranky. I can't possibly do what they do, but it's not that I disagree with them. It's more that I don't have the life experience or years of pent-up frustration to write such beautiful diatribes: vibrant denunciations that, at moments, rise to the effect of poetry. Of course, for every jeremiad, they write scores of constructive posts, but these don't usually go beyond the realm of the very interesting. Incidentally, I've considered posting on their message board, but the folks who post regularly can be fairly ferocious.

One example was S.M. Hutchens's “Reverie in E Minor,” in which he discussed the havoc his generation wrought on the music of church culture.

“My generation, my abysmally stupid and culpably foolish generation, had the opportunity to keep the good--for there was very much good here--discard the bad, and bring in a golden age of church music, an age of beauty and invention, now in obedient harmony with the Great Tradition, with good theology instead of bad, and with an eye trained upon the history of whole Church and its music. Instead, however, it went as bad as it possibly could, seizing upon all the old mistakes it could find and amplifying them.”

I am no fan of the Baby Boomers – thanks for the Social Security burden and the national debt, jerks! – and it always warms my heart to see them called “abysmally stupid and culpably foolish,” but I probably shouldn't be too hasty to judge until we see how my generation turns out. The more interesting question is whether or not Mr. Hutchens is correct in his judgment of rock music:

“Instead of turning their people toward the richness of the Christian musical tradition, their teachers spent their time justifying and promoting the music of rebels and drug addicts, now half-converted into something called ‘Christian rock.’”

And a few paragraphs later:

“The argument is that bringing them in will get them to heaven--but how can you show them heaven when you are presiding over a little piece of hell--a place where people are given vast quantities religious stimulation under the name of the “gospel,” the end of which can only be the a vast burned-over district where they have been effectively inoculated against Christianity by Evangelical religion, just as one is inoculated against Mozart by a steady diet of rock, or the realities of the world, including its beauties, by drug-eating, or against the power of words by overwhelming waves of pictures?”

Rock music: created by rebels and drug addicts to inoculate the youth of the world against Mozart. As someone who likes the stuff, I'm loathe to agree with him, but I think that I have to do it. Last night, I listened to the first hour or so of Bach's Mass in B Minor, wishing that I could understand it better than I do. Some mathematical types love Bach, and it's not hard to see why. But even with the words and liner notes in front of me, I had trouble keeping my mind on the music. I don't have the descriptive vocabulary to follow the music in its intricacies, and my ear's patience has no doubt been destroyed by several years of listening to Guided By Voices. Ah, well. There's time yet for me.

So, I thought I had my fix for the week, until I came across Dr. Tony Esolen's “The World that Has No Music in its Soul.” He starts from the wonderful article that writer/composer Webster Young published in the latest Intercollegiate Review, which was, in fact, the article that gave me the inclination to get out my Bach CDs. At any rate, Dr. Esolen argues that Webster Young's hopes for a revival of a “common language” for classical music may be premature:

“When Palestrina wrote his Masses, he was inspired by prayers that washerwomen and plowboys had heard every week of their lives; it was part of their common, lived experience. Without that inspiration from something beyond Renaissance Italy, and something the composer shared with all kinds of people who were not composers or singers, you do not get the exalted music and theology of the Credo of the Mass for Pope Marcellus. . .

“But what happens when you don't have a culture? I've argued this before, but it bears repeating. I'm taking the word literally. You have a culture when you cultivate those beliefs, customs, celebrations, and virtues you hold most dear; and in this sense culture is by nature conservative and often proudly local. That's why totalitarian systems despise it; it stands in the way of the flattening of variety that the modern state demands. But this consumer society of ours despises it, too. It stands in the way of the itch for the new-and-improved, for novelty for the sake of vanity. The last hundred years, in part through no consciously evil plan, has seen the gradual replacement of culture with mass entertainment.”

Read the full essays for the full effect. I'm not optimistic that my generation can do any better, but at least it's nice to hear a warning from the older crowd.