Happy Easter
"When the disciples saw the risen Christ, they beheld him as a reality in the world, though no longer of it, respecting the order of the world, but Lord of its laws. To behold such reality was different and more than to see a tree or watch a man step through a doorway. To behold the risen Christ was an experience that burst the bounds of the ordinary. This explains the extraordinary wording of the texts: the strangeness of Christ's 'appearing,' 'vanishing,' suddenly standing in the middle of a room or at someone's side. Hence the abruptness, fragmentariness, oscillation, contradictoriness of the writing . . . the only true form for content so dynamic that no existing form can contain it."
Romano Guardini, The Lord
Good Friday
Holy Thursday
Do You Ever Wonder if You Love Christ?
I mean, how do you really know? Our hearts are so complex.
March 27, 2024
That Huberman Story Has Legs
Man, that NY Mag "expose" is running everywhere. The best piece I've seen:
Suzy Weiss
Huberman is a non-member of that non-group, The Intellectual Dark Web. He runs with Rogan and the like. He, therefore, is outside the Establishment and, therefore, an enemy, even though I've never discerned a political position in the many hours I've listened to him.
But that's the thing, right? Among the Left, everything is political (it's part of the Communist playbook that requires everything to be disrupted), so a person is either on the correct team or the wrong team. If a person doesn't confirm that he's on the correct team, he must be on the wrong team.
If Bud Lite announced it wasn't going to take a position on trannies anymore, the Left would deem that an announcement that it opposes trannies. No neutrality. Neutrality implies that you won't confirm either side is correct. That's not acceptable to the fundamentalist, dogmatist, gnostic.
Huberman (to my knowledge) remained apolitical and thereby made himself a target to the Left. The Establishment today is Left, so it opposes Huberman, as evidenced by the legacy media piling onto this story, which, boiled down, isn't much of a story (summary of story: he's a cheating womanizer).
Weekly Column
March 26, 2024
Two Huberman Things
He recently posted a great interview with Cal Newport.
NY Mag just ran a fairly vicious biop on him.
March 25, 2024
Best Lede of the Year
I decided to post this essay because of its great opening paragraph. I decided to print it out for careful reading because of its great style. I know nothing about the author, Aaron Timm, except I'm going to start reading him more.
“Those of us who consume and participate in culture today… are all, at some level, hypocrites, complicit in the fortification of our own aesthetic prison”
March 24, 2024
Washington, D.C. is a Mess
I knew it was bad, but I didn't realize that the entire city was on the brink of collapse. Downtown is losing its NHL and NBA franchise to Virginia. Crime is out of control. The lead editorial in the current issue of Spectator World breaks it down. Two funny excerpts:
No single figure is more responsible for the sense that crimes have no consequences than President Biden’s pick for the District’s US attorney, Matthew Graves. Graves’s prosecutorial philosophy is a radical one: he basically only does it if the violent crime occurred on January 6, 2021.
Urban crime isn’t a simple left-versus-right issue; it’s more like a far-left versus everyone else issue.
March 22, 2024
BYCU
A TDE reader brought this e-rag to my attention: Thirsty. At first glance, it appears bookmark-worthy.
March 21, 2024
Father v. Son: Who Had a Better Time Last Night?
I attended Iain McGilchrist's lecture at the Plaster Auditorium at Hillsdale College.
This is my son Max at the Alestorm concert at Elevation Hall in Grand Rapids.
Front Porch Republic
Bill Kauffman appeared last week at the online magazine he started 15 years ago.
It's a nice little e-rag. Jeff Bilbro's weekly "Water Dipper" is one of my favorite columns (partly because it provides me with TDE fodder, but Bilbro's quippish summaries are good).
I wish the site would incorporate an active blog, however. A blog like the one at Lew Rockwell would be a great addition. I'd contribute to and read it.
March 20, 2024
Happy First Full Day of Spring
I guess it started last night around 11:00.
New Tool at TDE
March 19, 2024
March 18, 2024
China Uses the Free Market to Eliminate the Free Market
One of the more egregious examples of attempted CCP censorship isn’t included here. In 2019, Shannon Lee, who was raised in Hong Kong, voiced her displeasure with how her late father Bruce Lee was depicted in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (2019).
Ms. Lee contended that her father was made to look weak during an impromptu TV backlot fight scene between his character (Mike Moh) and a stunt man (Brad Pitt). Ms. Lee filed a complaint with the China Film Administration that in turn requested Mr. Tarantino remove the scene, which he refused to do. As a result, the CCP canceled the release of the film one week before its scheduled opening. To date, the movie has never played in China.
Michael Clark
March 17, 2024
Amazing Amazon Limited Time Deal
David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest for just $4.99. (Later Addendum: The deal is over. It's now $12.99)
Even though I own (and am plodding through) the paper copy, I splurged on this. It loaded nicely despite its massive size, and I think it might be better to read this book on Kindle.
Wallace was a huge tennis nut in his youth. He wrote parts of Jest to mimic a tennis game. How? He used a massive number of endnotes. The result: you have to go back and forth, just like a tennis rally. It's a hassle (and, frustratingly, I am now on page 100 and have skipped most of the endnotes, not realizing they were integral to the work).
Kindle makes the rally easier. You click the endnote link, read the endnote, then click "back to text." It's easy and for easier, turning that tennis groundstroke rally more into a volley rally with both players at the net.
Happy St. Patrick's Day
For the Great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry
And all their songs are sad.
GKC, The Ballad of the White Horse
The Northern Border has Now Become a Major Problem
The folks fly into Canada then trudge into Vermont and North Dakota. In 2023, compared to 2020, it's up five-fold and is on pace in 2024 to crush the 2023 numbers. Graph.
And like the new immigrants coming across the southern border, these folks appear to be well-funded. They're not poor and we're not even sure what they're yearning for. I don't know what Emma Lazarus would've thought of them:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus (1883)
Or what Lou Reed would've thought (chuckle):
Give me your hungry, your tired, your poor I'll piss on 'em
that's what the Statue of Bigotry says
Your poor huddled masses, let's club 'em to death
and get it over with and just dump 'em on the boulevard
Lou Reed, Dirty Boulevard (1989)
Allan Stein
March 16, 2024
An Excellent Introduction to the Problem Bitcoin Solves
If you want to make a lot of money, solve a problem. Or in Bitcoin's case, solve a problem by creating a lot of money (here, 21,000,000 bitcoins), then capping it.
The Ides of March
You may have heard the phrase “beware the Ides of March,” but what is an Ides and what’s there to fear? The Ides is actually a day that comes about every month, not just in March—according to the ancient Roman calendar, at least. The Romans tracked time much differently than we do now, with months divided into groupings of days counted before certain named days: the Kalends at the beginning of the month, the Ides at the middle, and the Nones between them.
BYCU
March 14, 2024
Leftists Trying Not to be Gnostics
Current Affairs seems like a worthwhile magazine. It describes itself as "the left magazine for people skeptical of leftism." Based on this essay, it seems pretty far left . . . Bernie Sanders-left . . . but intellectually honest left.
In the perspective of the Hemisphere Hypothesis, an "intellectually honest" leftist is a person who thinks within the restrictive parameters of his rationalist (and normally Gnostic) cocoon, but is also aware, if only semi-consciously, that his cocoon is limited and there's a lot more out there that he might not be considering.
The intellectually honest leftist, in other words, rationalizes from leftist principles but values reason to reach broader conclusions. Current Affairs seems to be such a rag.
March 13, 2024
Cabrini
Michael Rodney didn't much care for Cabrini. I saw the movie and I agree with everything he says, but I'd give it a "6" (he gives it a "4"). It would've gotten a "7" from me, but the last line of the movie made me (literally and physically, but also metaphorically and viscerally) roll my eyes, so that cost it a full point. As Rodney points out, the movie doesn't "get" the whole saint thing.
March 11, 2024
Monday Column
It's a short column, but I think a lot of TDE readers appreciate the brevity. Let me know.
If you hadn't noticed, TDE has been using an unusual format for a few months. It provides a generous excerpt from an essay or article, then comments on it, putting the comments in a separate post that is then embedded at the beginning of the excerpted essay/article. Sometimes the separate post is a "Briefly" that scarcely stands on its own without a reference to the excerpted essay/article; sometimes it's a mini-essay that stands on its own (in which case, it is included under "Latest" on the right side of the homepage). Sometimes the separate post is also pasted into the Scrolling Blog, creating a three-point cross-reference (Scrolling Blog to Excerpted Essay/Article to Separate Post). If tagged properly, it also creates a library of script that I can (so my left-hemisphere says) later efficiently organize into more substantial essays or online books.
Anyway, that's probably more than you want to know about the inner-machinations of TDE, but there you have it.
March 8, 2024
BYCU
March 7, 2024
The Inherent and Severe Limitations of Thinking
In the early 1990s, I practiced law with a lot of impressive Jewish attorneys. One, particularly so. He was brilliant, aggressive, and driven. He also held a Ph.D. in philosophy. I always wanted to ask him why he got a doctorate in philosophy and then went to law school, but the one time I broached the topic of philosophy, he was caustic and cryptic. When I asked him about a Cartesian assertion I had recently read about, he said, "Are those old bones still rattling around?" Then he moved the conversation to the case we were working on.
That was the early 1990s. At least in philosophical academia, Descartes' ideas were dead and discredited.
But those old bones are still rattling around. Indeed, they're so fixed in our cultural landscape, it seems like every legitimate thinker is trying to dislodge them from our collective crania.
I doubt any thinker today believes we are purely rational beings who make decisions based on objective facts. Yet, we live in a culture that bows obsequiously and submits to "experts" who claim to do just that. The morons who urge us to "follow the science" are wholly aware that no one follows the science. Everyone--and every scientist--approaches every subject of thought with assumptions, modes of interpretation, personal biases, and a host of other cognitive "imperfections" (not really imperfections, btw) that make objective approaches impossible.
That doesn't mean we oughtn't try to be objective, incidentally. There's a huge difference between trying to consider all the facts to reach a good (as objective as possible) conclusion and thinking you have all the facts and can reach a good (wholly objective) conclusion.
"All the facts" means taking into account our cognitive imperfections. That is the essence of Pragmatism (I find myself admiring William James more and more these days . . . 25 years after falling in love with his The Varieties of Religious Experience). When we reach our rational conclusion, it ought to be with intense humility: at our cognitive biases we perceive, our cognitive biases we don't perceive, the cognitive biases of the people who gave us the facts that we took into consideration . . . and 243,901 other things, including things that wholly transcend our understanding (let's lump them under the term "Providence").
Our inability to see clearly is clear (pardon the paradox).
But our culture continues to harbor the ridiculous conceit.
The main reason, of course, is that those Cartesian bones can be wielded by politicians to implement their plans and designs. If there are objective answers to be derived from objective facts, the politicians who claim access to the experts to give them those objective answers can coherently implement whatever policies they want.
We all saw where it led in 2020-2021 when the experts merely "followed the science" and politicians had a great time, using a crisis to implement all sorts of draconian laws. I'm sure it was heady stuff for the politicians, to be using their superior intellectual powers to do so much good.
The problem, of course, is their superior intellectual powers are fatally flawed.
And that fatal flaw is the most important piece of information.
March 6, 2024
American Vandal
Michael Rodney endorses American Vandal. I strongly endorse his strong endorsement. It's possibly the best and funniest mini-series I've seen.
March 5, 2024
The Mere Concept of "Mental Health" Makes Us Unhealthy
Of course, this concern is rooted in language itself. By positing one thing, we amplify its opposite. It's why postmodernists hate binaries. It drove ancient Taoism's admonitions not to look at concepts like "good" and "hate." It drove the background of Dostoyevsky's story, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.
But it doesn't change the fact: By asserting a concept like "mental health," we start looking for ways we aren't mentally healthy. And because our minds are remarkably complex and largely can't be explained (and not remotely understood) by science, we can all find ways we aren't "mentally healthy."
And on top of that, we incentivize people not to be mentally healthy, either by coddling them or flat-out giving them money.
The result: More and more people find themselves mentally unhealthy. And the further result: They do start to become mentally sick. Even if they start out wholly as frauds who merely pretend to be sick so they can go on disability, they eventually become sick. It's the lesson of the "Let's Pretend" chapter in C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity.
How long until a parent loses custody because he refuses to castrate his son?
"Gender-affirming care" will soon become a term of derogation, even in the corporate media. Every euphemism eventually becomes a joke and has to be replaced with something else by those who refuse to acknowledge the blemish concealed by the euphemism.
CNA
One of the most interesting book reviews of the young year
(Subscription may be required)
Jonathan Sumption
From the earliest agricultural settlements, some 8,000 years ago, most of mankind have been peasants. Yet in barely a century they have all but vanished. As recently as 1950, only a fifth of the world’s population lived in cities. Today 60 percent do. The figures for Europe are even starker. France was once the greatest peasant country on the continent, but today only 3 percent of the population is employed in agriculture. In the former communist countries of eastern Europe the same transformative changes have been compressed into just three decades. Where have the peasants gone? To the cities, to industry and services.
March 4, 2024
From the TDE Mailbag
Around 2003 in Chile, when the original trilogy of Star Wars began airing on television there, they did this funny thing to avoid cutting to commercial breaks. They stitched the commercials into the films themselves. Here is one of them, with the English dub added in. pic.twitter.com/wC7N2vPNvv
— Windy 🛸 (@heyitswindy) March 2, 2024
Monday Column
It's interesting (and runs contrary to this essay) that our left-hemispheric modern culture goes to extremes to accommodate unusual people, like the overweight. Such tolerance, though, is born of the same dogmatism that caused the Nazis to euthanize the disabled. It's part of the postmodern religion of destroying all poles of the binary that have traditionally been privileged, which facilely shades off into destroying anything traditional, like the traditional belief that healthy is better than unhealthy . . . fit better than fat.
March 1, 2024
Light Blogging
My apologies for the light blogging this week. I've been in Tennessee and South Carolina, visiting family and commiserating with the Agrarians. Regular blogging resumes Monday.
BTW: There will be no "Outside the Modern Limits" newsletter tomorrow morning.
February 29, 2204
I Loathe the Republican Party
But Thank Goodness for the Republican Party
This issue is so important, I'm not inclined to much care what kind of politics or demagoguery or other roguery is driving the opposition, just as long as this measure is exposed and stopped. It's that important.
Stephen Katte
Fadiman Revisted . . . and Revisited and Revisited
I like admirations that seem wholly disproportionate to the subject.
I'm not talking about the instant canonization of criminals. I'm also not talking about our culture's nauseating tendency to beat the living heck out of every fad, nor about our culture's tendency to go saccharine on anything beautiful, nor about our culture's inability to keep laudatory words within their original definition (e.g., calling everyone who does his job a "hero").
I'm talking about an earnest and elaborate admiration for something that, though worthy of respect and attention, wouldn't seem to merit such earnestness and elaboration.
Such is the 7,500-word essay that The Lamp published recently about Clifton Fadiman's A Lifetime Reading Plan (which is out of print, but you can find a revised and expanded version still in print here). I highly recommend it. It was good enough to get me to take my copy off the bookshelf and start reading entries again. I had forgotten how good it was.
Two Asides
The Lamp is a Catholic journal. Fadiman was close friends with the godfather of the Great Books program, Mortimer Adler, and dedicated A Lifetime Reading Plan to him. Surprisingly, the essay doesn't mention that Adler converted to Catholicism at the end of his life.
The Lamp has run a few (two? three?) essays by the great Joseph Epstein. Many years ago, Epstein wrote an unflattering portrait of the Great Books project, especially its "Synopticon" and its editor, Adler. Epstein's portrait of Adler was, by today's standards, civil, but by Epstein's standards, kinda vicious. I remember reading it and thinking, "This level of negativity is out of character for Epstein. He must've loathed Adler."
Mr. Payne, incidentally, seems to line up with Epstein's negative assessment of the Great Books project, especially the Synopticon, which he hilariously refers to as "an exercise in subclinical autism."
This two-volume work inventories one hundred and two Great Ideas, from Angel to World. The entry for each Great Idea contains references to passages in the Great Books where it is mentioned or discussed. It is hard to imagine this work being put to use by either laymen or scholars. If a layman is interested in the topic of Love, for instance, painstakingly searching up every mention of it, great or small, from Homer to Freud, seems like a less efficient use of time than reading a general overview, like de Rougemont’s. On the other hand, a scholar who is studying Plato’s idea of love will need years of philological work which Great Books in translation cannot give him, and will need to hone in on certain key passages and their controversies, such as Diotima’s ladder of ascent, which the Synopticon, in its completionist, all-inclusive grasp, will not differentiate. This index, the labor of seven years, today seems little more than an exercise in subclinical autism, one which even proponents of Great Books education never use. The Synopticon’s lack of educational purpose did not stop the Encyclopædia Britannica from commissioning an army of salesmen to travel around the country teaching people how to use it.
