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A World Split Apart
Commencement Address Delivered At Harvard University
June 8, 1978
By Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn
I am sincerely happy to be here with you on the occasion of the 327th commencement of this old and illustrious university. My congratulations and best wishes to all of today's graduates.
Harvard's motto is "VERITAS." Many of you have already found out and others will find out in the course of their lives that truth eludes us as soon as our concentration begins to flag, all the while leaving the illusion that we are continuing to pursue it. This is the source of much discord. Also, truth seldom is sweet; it is almost invariably bitter. A measure of truth is included in my speech today, but I offer it as a friend, not as an adversary. ( Read more... )
R.I.P. to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was until today the world's greatest living writer.
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I just finished Turmoil and Truth which did an outstanding job of pinpointing the origins of modernism and neomodernism within the Catholic Church. When I read about figures such as Schleiermacher, Tyrrell, Teilhard de Chardin, Bultmann, etc., it reminds me of something Steve Sailer once said: much of what we are taught as the high intellectual history of the human race is based more on the magnetism and impenetrable self-assurance of thinkers than on minor issues like whether they were right or not. Freud is a perfect example. He is to modern psychology what Ptolemy is to modern astronomy, but during his lifetime he managed to bewitch two generations with his invincible self-esteem. As bad ideas go though, Freud's bad ideas weren't as catastrophic as the other bad ideas that wrecked the 20th century. Freudians didn't set up slave labor camps or engage in mass murder; they just wasted a lot of the time and money of people who had a lot of time and money to waste. Ayn Rand was cut from the same cloth, though thanks be to God, her bad ideas never spread as far and wide as Freud's.
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Owned
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Apr. 30th, 2008 @ 11:35 am
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...two days later, the Bishop’s secretary plunged into Don Camillo’s office. The young priest, like all the progressive priests of the Aggiornamento, despised and detested all parish priests…
"Reverend Father!" he ranted. "Is it possible that you lie in wait for opportunities to show your obtuseness as regards political and social matters involving the Church? What is the meaning of this latest sideshow of yours? Quite rightly Mayor Botazzi intends to encourage tourism and adapt the town to the needs of the motorized times—- and to do this he wants to create an ample parking lot here in the square. How can you have the arrogance to oppose this project?"
"No arrogance at all: I’m simply preventing the destruction of Church property."
"What Church property! You can’t clutter half a town square with useless columns. Don’t you understand what an advantage it will be to you? Aren’t you aware that many people don’t come to Mass because they can’t find a place to park their cars?"
"Certainly I know that," Don Camillo answered calmly. "However, I don’t believe the mission of a pastor of souls should be to organize parking lots and rock Masses to provide the public with a religion complete with all the modern conveniences. The Christian religion is not, and should not be, either comfortable or amusing."
His point of view was a bit hackneyed and it caused the Bishop’s priest to explode. "My dear Father, you appear not to have grasped that the Church must attempt to bring itself up to date, and it should be helping progress, not blocking it!"
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There was no point in arguing with such an old fossil, so the secretary wound up the discussion. "Don Camillo, are you saying that you refuse to obey?"
"No, if his excellency the Bishop orders us to transform the colonnade into a parking lot, we will do so, even though the Council has reasserted that the Church of Christ is the Church of the poor people and consequently should not have to worry about the cars of the faithful." - Don Camillo e i giovani d'oggi, by Giovannino Guareschi
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"The natural law ... provides the necessary basis for the civil law with which it is connected, whether by a reflection that draws conclusions from its principles, or by additions of a positive and juridical nature." The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1959
The normative force of all positive law, including the US Constitution, rests on the natural law. Positive law loses all normative force when it attempts to contradict the natural law. But that does not at all imply that positive law has no stable meaning. The idea that we have a "living Constitution" is a leap from the positivist frying pan into the emanations and penumbras of postmodern fire. Both ideas are Nietzschean attempts to push the natural law outside the bounds of reality that has consequences and replace it with the will to power of the free and equal superman. When a legal system is disconnected from the natural law, something will arise to fill in the gaps in the messiness of every day human affairs. With apologies to Chesterton, a man who rejects natural law will not believe in no law; he'll believe in any law.
If you haven't read it yet, I strongly recommend The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution. Here, the author responds to a critic.
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| » Only a fool's hope |
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From ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) johncwright comes this meditation, appropriate for Ash Wednesday, of the differences between hope and hopelessness and between J.R.R. Tolkien and Peter Jackson.
Feb. 6th, 2008 @ 10:44 am
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| » I refute it THUS! |
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I finished From Dawn to Decadence the other day. The author, Jacques Barzun, celebrated his one hundredth birthday last year. In the interview he said that Western civilization has been going downhill since at least 1914. It's hard to disagree with him, particularly after reading his magnum opus. The last two hundred pages are the most vivid in my memory. It is difficult to overemphasize how... crazy, for lack of a better term, the world became during and after World War I. That title is something of a misnomer since there were world wars in the eighteenth century. WWI was not only a world-wide conflict but it was also another "people's war" the likes of which had not been seen since the Thirty Years War.
It's difficult to grasp the enormity of war. We read popular histories and think, "Oh wow, over 450,000 Americans died in WWII." How many of them were budding young writers, poets, artists, musicians, architects, or scientists? Barzun eschews the standard political-military-centric nature of other popular histories. The subtitle says the book is a survey of Western culture. Among many things it provides a short history of the detective story, Surrealist literature (which Barzun defends), Bauhaus architecture, Renaissance art, Humanist satires, Enlightenment plays, etc. Barzun believes the twenty years from 1885 to 1905 - which he calls the nineties - and the Cubist decade from 1905 to 1914 saw promising developments in all the fields of human endeavor, all cut short by WWI. The war derailed some of these budding young schools of thought, or diverted them into strange cul de sacs from which some have yet to emerge.
Ours is an Absurdist culture. What capital "A" absurd means is working at cross purposes. We spend billions on public education and push our children to EXCELLENCE because America has to be THE BEST at everything, yet we pounce on any individual display of superiority as elitism. We deplore violence and sexual promiscuity in young people, yet the violence and pornography in movies, the internet, books, television, and music cannot be suppressed in the interest of "free speech." Speech, in the United States anyway, has come to include actions. Burning the flag is a statement of opinion. This legalistic understanding of speech would seem to authorize assassination.
Barzun is generally conservative, but I think everyone could learn a lot from this. At 800 pages it's no light reading. You can read it profitably from start to finish like I did, or you can open up to any page and learn something new and interesting.
Jan. 29th, 2008 @ 11:23 am
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| » "You are the Son of the living God!" |
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Don't let anyone ever tell you differently: Lady Macbeth was vanquished, annihilated, and utterly destroyed today. If Hillary AND Bill are going to run against him, how fitting that he received nearly two votes for every one of hers. Not that I'm happy with Mr. More-pro-abortion-than-Planned-Parenthood's victory, or as the media has anointed him, the Son of God. If anyone finds any egregiously orgasmic Obama worship in the MSM or the blogosphere tomorrow, let me know. That stuff kills me.
I just finished Hugh Laurie's first novel, The Gunseller. The plot was forgettable - your standard one man versus the military-industrial-complex tale - but the main character, Thomas Lang, was awesome in every way. Imagine House as a former soldier turned hired gun. Now imagine him as a first person narrator and it equals win.
Jan. 26th, 2008 @ 10:18 pm
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