C.S. Lewis would’ve said “zero.” It’s the Tao that helps you find the beer.

It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar.

That’s C.S. Lewis writing about the Tao in his famous book, The Abolition of Man. Since the book’s publication in 1947, Lewis’s name has been associated with the Tao because of his love and respect for the natural law it embodies.

But I associate Lewis with the Tao for a different reason: his beer drinking.

You see, Lewis spent many Tuesday mornings at the Eagle and Child public house drinking beer with J.R.R. Tolkien and other friends.

It’s vintage Lewis. Although he was at times melancholy, Lewis could find enjoyment almost anywhere doing almost anything: attending church, taking long country walks, living at his humble Kilns, tutoring students, writing theology or children’s fiction, teaching.

The difference between enjoying and enjoying the enjoying

Lewis’s capacity for enjoyment stemmed at least partly from the early influence of a little-known Australian philosopher named Samuel Alexander.

Alexander pointed out the distinction between enjoying something and being aware of the enjoying. Here’s how Lewis put it:

“Enjoyment and the contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible. You cannot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment. Of course, the two activities can and do alternate with great rapidity, but they are distinct and incompatible.

Thoughts build your everyday existence. Technology affects your thoughts. The implications? Ask Marshall McLuhan.

Sometimes I’m Gothic. Other times, Tudor-ish. In the morning I might be Romanesque, but by the afternoon I’m Bauhaus.

The architecture of my mind changes day-to-day, hour-to-hour, sometimes minute-to-minute. I generally want to live a life of good deeds, uplifting counsel, and noble thoughts. But as a typical human being, the mental architecture of a particular day or hour might be more inclined to make me obsess about money, be loud, or tell ribald jokes.

The most troubling thing: the architecture I wake up with or shift into during the day isn’t a conscious choice. I don’t wake up and say, “Well, yesterday I was Gothic: grand, prayerful, elevated in thought, word, and deed. Today, I want to be Victorian-like: noble, demur, of refine appearance. Tomorrow, I’ll be Romanesque: sleek, elegant, and a temple to the pursuit of money.”

It doesn’t work like that. I wake up or find myself in the middle of the day with a mental architecture I didn’t choose.

Pretty much the only thing I can do is work with it the best I can. The ease or difficulty of working with it depends on what I want to do.

If the architectural style that day is Romanesque and I want to make a lot of money, it’s a great fit. But if I want to be in my study, meditating with the Stoics? That’s tough. It’d be like living a life of chastity at the Playboy mansion.

Control your thoughts

Our mental architecture is crucial to determining whether we’ll be kind or rude, noble or mean, courteous … Read the rest

The wedding hiatus starts now. We’ve married off three kids in 16 months. The second two were planned, unplanned, and replanned under COVID restrictions, which made them particularly brutal.

But the married kids seem happy and the single kids are doing well so I’m happy.

Someone once said you’re only as happy as your least happy kid. I’m not sure that’s true, but it might be . . . and there’s definitely something there.

The Relentless Leftist

Marie marvels about a liberal friend who is incapable of saying anything without exuding politics from every pore of her skin.

When, for instance, the friend recently asked her, by all accounts, conventional and heterosexual teenage niece about her new boyfriend, she enthused, “So what’s he, or she, like?”

I told Marie it could just be the leftist political playbook: politics must inform every corner of life. Or maybe it’s a constant fear not to be woke, lest people think you less intelligent. Or maybe it’s just relentless virtue signaling.

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Given that the left has sought the complete transformation of society, and given that such wholesale change is bound to come up against the resistance of ordinary people who don’t care for having their routines and patterns of life overturned, we should not be surprised that the instrument of mass terror has been the weapon of choice. The people must be terrified into submission, and so broken and demoralized that resistance comes to seem impossible.

Lew Rockwell

What’s that? Why do I say it’s a play from the leftist playbook?

Because it is.

Socialism, including its manifestation in certain forms of liberalism, wants to re-make society and the

Booze Coke

I don’t know if I’m surprised because it’s Coke or because it’s the first Coke product with alcohol: Coca-Cola launching its first alcoholic beverage next year.

It’s going to be an alcoholic version of its Topo Chico sparkling water.

I’d love to comment more, but I don’t listen to Judy Garland or drink sparkling water.

I’m content with rum and Coke or vodka and Coke. If I’m feeling randy, I add a lime wedge.

Pot Booze

Cannabis beverages are getting rolled out next year.

I tried one (stripped of its hallucinogenic properties) while at the 2018 marijuana convention. I wasn’t impressed by the taste.

But I am intrigued by this development. I have long maintained that marijuana is substantively different than booze because you can’t “dial in” the buzz. You go from 0 to 60. So you never slide from sober, to enjoyable relaxation, to venial sin, to mortal sin. It’s just, wham, mortal sin.

If there were a way to slide into the buzz more, then maybe it would be alright.

Cannabis beverages might be the ticket. When I spoke to that one vendor back in 2018, he said that was exactly the market they were looking for.… Read the rest

One forgotten ancient suggests what we might do with all of today’s information

When reading, I numb. When surfing the Internet, my eyes glaze. When thinking — about all the things to be thought, all the books to be read, all the websites to frequent — I freeze. 

Not always of course, but occasionally.

Everyone knows about the mammoth caverns of information at everyone’s door: two billion websites; thousands of must-read new books every year; piles of magazines and newspapers; cable television; streaming services and their docuseries; AM, FM, and satellite radio; podcasts; entire libraries digitalized and online.

It’s gotten so bad that a group at Kings College in London studied the effects of “informational overload” and concluded that it harms concentration more than marijuana.

And that was about ten years ago, when we had only 100 million websites to choose from.

We now speak of “information literacy,” a branch of knowledge dedicated to searching and deciphering information. Efforts to increase information literacy are spearheaded by the American Library Association and funded with federal and private grants.

Everyone calls it the “Information Age,” but that doesn’t do the endless proliferation of data justice.

It’s better called the “Too Much Information Age.”

Enter a pagan saint

If the TMI Age has a pagan saint, it might be Pyrrho of Ellis.

Historians of philosophy refer to this younger contemporary of Aristotle as an early skeptic, but he wasn’t. The skeptic claims there’s nothing to know. Pyrrho was more radical. He said we can’t even know if we can’t know. He was skeptical about skepticism. He was neither dogmatic like Aristotle nor … Read the rest

Simple observations from the medieval poster boy will give you new perspectives

The famous historian Will Durant ranked Thomas Aquinas as the fourth greatest thinker of all time.

When I saw that, I was shocked. Aquinas is the Catholic thinker extraordinaire. He is a canonized saint. His nickname is “The Angelic Doctor.”

Durant wasn’t impressed by such things, to say the least.

An Aside: Will Durant

A quick detour about Will Durant might be helpful to explain why it’s significant that he respected Aquinas so much.

Durant is best known for his monumental 11-volume The Story of Civilization, but he first made his name with the publication of The Story of Philosophy, which became an unlikely bestseller, selling 2,000,000 copies in the 1920s.

The book doesn’t have much Aquinas, and that’s an understatement. Its chapters jump from Aristotle (d. 322 BCE) to Francis Bacon (d. 1626 CE). The 2,000 years in-between receive only nine pages (out of 540). Thinkers like Epictetus, Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas are mentioned only once or not at all.

It’s not surprising. Most of those missed years are conventionally known as the “Middle Ages” and they were in thorough disrepute during much of the twentieth century. If you told someone in the 1920s that you were studying the Middle Ages, she would’ve looked at you like someone would look at you today if you told her you’re studying VHS tapes.

Durant was raised Catholic. As a teenager, he planned on becoming a priest and enrolled at the Seton Hall University seminary in 1909. He spent a lot of time at the seminary library, diving into the likes of Darwin … Read the rest