Political Illusions

To those who believe that presidential primaries and such things still have any real significance, I recommend you listen to this presentation by Father Matthew Raphael Johnson to dispel those illusions.

A Friend in England

Father Andrew Phillips, a priest of St John's Orthodox Church in England, has given us an excellent essay on forced unions versus confederations of friendship and free consent:  '2012: The Quest for Empire and the Tragedy of the West'.  

Fr Andrew begins with the origins of the centralised state in Western Europe and then discusses its many iterations over the years.

Haunted by the pagan Roman Empire, the leaders of Western Europe who quested for empire have always wanted to restore its Union and technology. Like barbarian children imitating a barbarian adult, they forgot that its Union was imposed by brute force and torture. They forgot that its culture was not a culture of the spirit, but only a culture of the mind, of legalism, of engineering, of infrastructure, of know-how, of technology.  (p.3)

Each time that a Western European nation tried to set up an imitation Roman Empire, called by a Roman name, such as ‘Britannia’, and cloaked in Roman rituals and symbols like Emperor Napoleon, it set about destroying the sovereignty of other nations. The sovereign nation-state was not to blame for this; it was precisely states which were dissatisfied with their sovereignty and that of others which wanted to become Unionist Empires that were to blame. The whole problem was caused by a lack of respect for sovereignty. By 1945, exhausted, bombed into ruins and bankrupt, Western Europe realised that a European Empire could not be set up by military means, but only by economic means. The architect of this quest for a new European Empire was a man called Jean Monnet and his inspiration was in the Federal USA.  (pp. 4, 5)

The United States of America was formed as a result of another coup d’état, a ‘Revolution’, much inspired by the ideas of the French Revolution, which occurred only thirteen years after the American one. Its leaders offered a New Jerusalem, but it was a false New Jerusalem, whose whole founding ideology, exported to North America from Western Europe, can be seen on any one-dollar bill. The USA is Europe’s colony as much as the Soviet Union ever was. If Europe’s symbol is twelve stars, the Soviet symbol was a red star, America’s symbol is a white star. But how did a voluntary Confederation of Free States in North America become a single country, a centralised Republic? How did we go from saying ‘the United States are’ to ‘the United States is’?

There is little doubt that the turning point in the process was Lincoln’s War of 1861-1865, known variously as the American Civil War or the Second War of Secession. This consolidated the USA in the nineteenth-century European sense. (p. 6)

The path away from totalitarian centralised empire-states, according to Fr Andrew, begins with a true understanding of the Trinity and the principles that grow out of such an understanding.

Theologically speaking, Orthodox Christendom and her Church are distinguished from the Western world by our adherence to the original Scriptural, Apostolic and Patristic confession of the Holy Trinity (Jn. 15, 26). This is the Faith that proclaims belief in God the Father, from Whom is generated the Son and from Whom proceeds the Holy Spirit. No others who call themselves Christians confess this Faith. This Faith they have lost, consciously or unconsciously, through faithlessness. This Orthodox Trinitarian model of unity in diversity and diversity in unity has always been the model for relations within and between the Orthodox Christian peoples of the Orthodox Christian Commonwealth, for as long as we kept our Faith and did not fall into Western-style nationalism (the Balkan Wars) or Western-style Unionism (the Soviet Union). The Orthodox Faith is the Faith of Confederation and Commonwealth, not of Papal Unionism or, by reaction to that, that of Protestant Individualism.  (pp. 8, 9)

Other works written by Fr Andrew are available at the Orthodox England web site.

The Plantation Owner and the CEO

By Walt Garlington

Slavery has thankfully perished from the South.  But that does not mean it cannot be studied without benefit.  In particular, is there anything in the conduct of the plantation owner of the antebellum South that the present-day chief executive officer (CEO) of a typical corporation might profit from emulating?

The plantation owner was the greatest force in the politics, economics, and morals of the South, the exemplar nearly all in that region tried to pattern their lives after (Weaver, 1989, p. 33, footnote 1).  Today in the United States the CEO holds that position of high influence (Bosworth, 2011, pp. 1-2), so it is essential that he live a life worth imitating, a life of virtue.  What we see manifested too many times is the opposite.  While both the CEO and plantation owner might often suffer from arrogance and an impatience with criticism that comes from a monopoly on power (Weaver, p. 40; Bosworth, p. 2), the similarities for the most part end there.

Taking the attitude toward money to begin with, the CEO’s chief aim is to make the highest profit for his corporation as possible, while at the same time seeking the highest compensation for himself.  These possibly conflicting goals aside, the focus nevertheless remains on acquiring as much as possible, with little thought given to proper limits.  The fixation on quarterly earnings reports of corporations and news of multimillion-dollar salaries, golden parachutes, and other rewards for CEOs bear this out.  The Southern gentleman, however, though he had a fondness for luxury, also possessed a ‘contempt directed at money-getting, as well as the belief that money itself is somehow contaminating’ (Weaver, p. 48). 

An underlying greed, then, is often present in the CEO’s character, while disinterest toward money was the usual mark of the plantation owner (Weaver, p. 47-8).

The CEO knows very few of his employees intimately, can take but little interest in their welfare, and does little to provide a sense of rootedness and security for them.  His human resources department normally recruits employees from across the country, uprooting them from their families and other long-standing connections with promises of material prosperity (large salaries, vacation time, health insurance, etc.).  His own personal interaction with those employees is then often limited to superficial conversations during his time ‘walking the floor’.  And if an employee’s work is not satisfactory (or perhaps for something as cold as cost efficiency), he will quickly be dismissed, with the CEO and his corporation providing scant support for him as he seeks his next source of income.

The example of the plantation owner, again, could not be more different.  Quoting Weaver, ‘The landholder, if he belonged to the tradition, would not concede that his servants meant nothing more to him than the value of their labor, nor did the servant ordinarily envisage the master as nothing more than a source of employment.  The master expected of his servants loyalty; the servants of the master interest and protection’ (39).  The highest example of this relationship is George Washington, Weaver says:  ‘Washington, for example, who was far from a sentimentalist on the subject of slavery, was accustomed to visit his sick slaves and on occasion to take over personal supervision of their treatment’ (39).  Indeed, the slave was considered a part of the master’s very own family (Livingston, 2010, p. 19).

From such a set of responsibilities and rights and expectations a strong sense of community developed on the plantation and throughout much of the antebellum South in which each person, from the highest station to the lowest, felt secure in his livelihood and was well respected for performing his particular role (Weaver, p. 36).  The fear of sudden unemployment and no sustenance by the order of a superior was generally unknown to them, but is all too well-known today. 

Furthermore, just as the good CEO is focused on eliminating rivals to his corporation in order to gain as much ‘market share’ as possible, disrupting innumerable families and communities in the process (Bosworth, pp. 1, 6), so the Southern gentleman was busy minding the affairs of his own estate – how he might make it more self-sufficient, less dependent on outsiders, letting his neighbour’s plantation alone, desiring neither its destruction nor its domination by his hand (Weaver, pp. 33-37).

Perhaps the most telling difference between the CEO and plantation owner is their respective attitudes toward the spiritual health of those under them.  For even the lowliest on the plantation, the slaves, Christian teaching was provided (Weaver, p. 35).  Writes M. E. Bradford, ‘…[M]ost Southerners recognized slaves as human beings in that they hoped to see them accept Christianity’  (1990, p. 223).  He continues, ‘There is no purpose in extending the Divine Grace made available to men through the death of God’s Son to creatures less than human’ (pp. 226-227, note 12). 

By acknowledging a slave’s ability to receive the grace of God, the master admitted the slave’s full humanity, for a man is not simply a mind or a body, but a trinity of body, mind, and spirit.  And though the slave’s free will was hedged in significant ways, this does not undermine the significance of the recognition of his triune nature.  Children likewise have their free will restricted by their parents and others but are still considered fully human.

With this in mind, and adding to it not only the total absence of religious instruction provided for a corporation’s employees but also the reprimands faced by those who express a religious opinion in the wrong manner, an unpleasant picture begins to emerge:  The employee appears as little more than raw material from which profit can be extracted - a body and mind only, whose spirit the CEO can show no regard for, whether out of fear of a lawsuit, or a desire not to offend the sensibilities of the pluralist elite, etc.  The corporate employee thus devolves into something less than human if we follow Bradford’s reasoning to its logical end.

* * *

For owning other human beings; his lack of grace when chided; his sometimes excessive spending; and his other faults, the Southern plantation owner deserves and has received his share of condemnation.  But if we are to judge even-handedly, the CEO must receive his own reprimand.  That the corporate economic system continues on largely free of criticism is telling:  CEOs truly are dominant in our society.

Despite its faults, the plantation system had some admirable traits:  its Christian vision, self-sufficiency, stable communities based on mutual respect, and more.  These are worthy of our attention and, where possible, should be grafted back into the life of our society. 

But the economic system built on slave labour is dead and gone, and no one mourns its passing.  We should strive mightily for the day when the lifeless body of the current corporate economic system, with all its attendant evils, is buried right beside it.

Works Cited

Bosworth, David.  ‘Compensation: The Cultural Contradictions of Philanthrocapitalism.’  Front Porch Republic.  Accessed 29 Dec. 2011.  Available from http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2011/11/compensation-the-cultural-contradictions-of-philanthrocapitalism/print/ .

Bradford, M. E.  ‘Against Lincoln: A Speech at Gettysburg.’  The Reactionary Imperative: Essays Literary & Political.  1^st ed.  Peru, IL: Sherwood Sugden & Co., 1990.

Livingston, Donald W.  ‘Why the War Was Not about Slavery.’  Confederate Veteran.  Vol. 68, No. 5 (September/October 2010).    Available from http://www.scv.org/pdf/Livingston.pdf .

Weaver, Richard M.  The Southern Tradition at Bay: A History of Postbellum Thought.  Eds. Core, George and M. E. Bradford.  1^st ed.  Washington, D. C.: Regnery Gateway, 1989.

Walt Garlington is a chemical engineer living in Monroe, Louisiana, and serves as editor of Confiteri.

America: The 'Hustler Civilization'

Kirkpatrick Sale wrote a masterful essay on this topic (e.g., 'this country has been about making and taking, a business culture with a commercial orientation, devoted to growth and power, wealth and property, private advancement and profit, militarism and materialism, expansion and empire') and on the 'alternative culture' to it manifested in 'a commitment to craft, community, the public good, the natural environment, spiritual practice, and the "simple life"' in his review of Morris Berman's book Why America Failed.

Regarding the South in particular, Mr Sale said:

And so the alternative culture, though it has always existed on the fringe, and still does even now, has never seriously derailed the steamengine of the hustler civilization nor in fact even slowed it down perceptively. In fact that civilization will always take steps to marginalize it, even destroy it if necessary, a fact that Berman illustrates in a chapter on the antebellum South. He shows how the South was "the one example we have of an opponent of [the dominant] ideology that had real political teeth," and blatantly opted for a life premodern (indeed "neofeudal"), agrarian, slow, conservative, and honoring tradition, honor, chivalry, and hospitality more than making a buck or inventing a gadget. This ultimately the increasingly industrial and expansive North could not stand and so began a war to destroy it. "The treatment of the South by the North," Berman says, "was the template for the way the United States would come to treat any nation it regarded as an enemy: not merely a scorched earth policy, but also a ‘scorched soul’ policy’" that it would use in Hawaii, the Philippines, Cuba, Japan, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and anywhere else it could achieve it.

In an age of cheap flattery of America's exceptionalism, it is more important than ever to listen to men like Mr Sale and Mr Berman.

First Principles

By Dr. Robert Peters

C.S. Lewis reminds us in The Abolition of Man that “for the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men…”

In Modernity without Restraint, Eric Voegelin outlines the attempts of modern Gnostics to immanentize the eschaton or “create” utopias without the transcendent through the power of the state.

The Triumph of the Therapeutic is Philip Rieff’s bold assertion about the state of Rousseau’s autonomous individual in late modernity, an individual bereft of story and of relationship; not a Promethean self but rather an estranged and shriveled self.

In the October 1993 issue of First Things, Robert W. Jenson narrates in his article, “How the World Lost Its Story,” the estrangement of Modernity from the Great Story which both frames and quickens creation.  In fact, God has been estranged from His creation and finds no place in it, including no place in the decaying liturgies of the Church.

In his article, “The First Conservative,” published in The American Conservative on 10 August 2011, Dr. Donald Livingston lays out David Hume’s insight that the philosopher must follow the philosophical process inexorably to the point of nihilism and ultimately to humility and just there find that the abstractions of philosophy cannot replace the common sense of the real world and the relationships which it demands.  Hume distinguishes between religion which is based on fear and humility and philosophy which is based on curiosity and pride.   False philosophy is, according to Hume, “the Voice of Pride not Nature.”  False philosophy gives man a false hope in abstract ideas.  True philosophy brings the thinker to the point of nihilism and then beyond to the real world.

These scholars and thinkers give contour to first principles which can be extrapolated from their writings, writing from different eras, on different continents and with different context, yet with a common theme.

At the heart of the common theme is that man is a creature in a created order in which man must learn to live creaturely if he is to be happy.  The other part of that theme is that man is not content to live creaturely in the created order, as C. S. Lewis says, “conforming the soul to reality,” which from the Christian understanding would also mean that we are limited not only by being mere creatures but by being fallen creatures who do not adequately understand our condition or the condition of the creation in which we have our being. As Lewis, however, asserts man prefers to reject creaturehood and to attempt “to subdue reality to the wishes of men.”  If, as Jenson asserts, Modernity has cut itself off from the framing and quickening story of the Gospel, then all stories lose their context and meaning.  Man is cut off from his Creator.  His option then is to embrace the nihilism which Hume says is the end of philosophy or to himself create a fiction of reality which rejects the transcendent but somehow embodies it or, as Voegelin puts it, “to immanentize the eschaton.” Philip Rieff reminds us, going all the way back to Plato, that therapy was once that which we gave the gods and in return received a blessing from them.  Today, we give ourselves or have given to ourselves by psychiatrists and psychologists therapy, suggesting that we believe ourselves to be gods; or that in our dark but self-imposed estrangement from the Creator, the creation and even our own nature as creatures, we in vain attempt the ancient liturgy of therapy but without communion.

Rieff calls the circumstance of Modernity the therapeutic culture or the anti-culture.  The term “anti-culture” offers a meaningful juxtaposition to “culture.”

Culture consists of the traditions, customs, habits, institutions and principles which restrain the whims, desires and compulsions of the person so that he is free to execute his responsibilities, duties and obligations to God, to Church, to family and to the local commonwealth.  That freeing from so that one is free to is the process of developing character.  Character is the acquiring, internalizing and living out of the great virtues: the cardinal virtues, the capital virtues and the Christian or theological virtues.  Providence gave to our classical ancestors, the Greeks and the Romans, a keen awareness of the cardinal and the capital virtues, and they developed a means of training young men in the acquisition of the virtues: artes liberals, made up of the Trivium and the Quadrivium.  Dante, in his Divine Comedy, provides the melding of the classical and Christian virtues in “Paradiso” as Saint Beatrice takes over as guide from Virgil, telling Virgil that he carried his light behind him in the classical virtues but that now she completes them with the Christian virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity. 

At the heart of culture, pagan or Christian, is that which we have come to call “religion.” Religion is man’s realization, always imperfect, that “something” is moving through the created order and man is required to respond to it, to the best of his abilities, and to align himself with the order which he senses to be revealed or apprehended in creation itself.  This is the act of trying to live creaturely: in harmony with the created order and the Creator of that order.  In the Christian understanding, we cannot align ourselves with God and cannot live creaturely until the fall has been undone.  The means to the undoing of the fall is the Gospel.  Grace is extended to man because the Second Person of the Trinity fleshed Himself into history as the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, and thereby became our Kinsman Redeemer, the Second Adam, in that He suffered, He died, He arose and He ascended.  Grace, the gift made possible through that Passion, is received by and in Faith, itself a gift of God.  Once Grace is imputed through Faith, we can begin the quest of living creaturely within the divine order.   This is the Gospel of the Church Age, an age of culture, from its pagan antecedents in Greece and Rome to the end of that age, coming perhaps in the late Middle Ages, during the Renaissance or at the Enlightenment.

The hallmark of Modernity is Rieff’s anti-culture.  The anti-culture is the deconstruction of the customs, traditions, habits, institutions and principles which would restrain the whims, lusts and compulsions of the individual so that the individual can pursue those drives unencumbered by convention or taboo.  The person becomes the individual: the Rousseauian individual or autonomous individual – the would-be Promethean self.  This autonomous individual is then outfitted with the abstract Lockean rights of life, liberty and property.  Character is no longer important or even desired because character is an internalized restraining force.  In the place of character rises the cult of personality, malleable and marketable.  Yet, this would-be Promethean self, bereft of relationship which is itself a restraining force, is really an estranged, alienated and shriveled self, seen in millions of faces from the homeless on the streets to the glamorous of Hollywood with their addictions and their loneliness and their suicides and murders.  It is little wonder that the vampire – the ultimate estranged, alienated and shriveled self, a parasite on life itself – has become the cult attraction of the American middle class, particularly females.    Although there has been an attempt to rehabilitate the vampire – to make evil good and good evil – the vampire remains that evil which destroys the created order. By his erotic attraction and his demonic power he draws the girl from the protection of the father, the brother, the fiancé or the husband.   He draws her from God, from home, from Church and from communion with kith and kin and the local commonwealth.

Freedom in a culture is freedom from our whims, desires and compulsions so that we are free to fulfill our duties, responsibilities and obligations in all of the relationships which the created order by its very nature demands.  Freedom in an anti-culture is freedom from the restraining forces of customs, traditions, habits, institutions and principles so that the individual can pursue his whims, compulsions and desires without restraint.

In a culture, character is of the utmost importance, for through it and with it we learn to live and live creaturely.  In the anti-culture, personality, uninhibited, is of the most importance; for by it we can express ourselves from the wildest orgies to the most horrible and destructive wars.

In a culture, we subjugate ourselves in subsidiarity to different levels of hierarchy: God, Church, family, and local commonwealth.  We nurture the sacred places of communion: the marriage bed for husband and wife; the supper table for the family; the communion table for the family of Faith; and the garden – the vegetable garden for nourishment; the flower garden for beauty and the churchyard or cemetery where the Christian will receive his last baptism, buried with Him in the hope of the resurrection, where the curse of that other garden Eden will be undone as we rise in Eternal Day.

In the anti-culture, we deny and decry the sacred places, destroying the marriage bed with adultery and unnatural acts; displacing the gathering place of the supper table with the television and computer; reducing communion among the saints and with the Lord to mere symbol and letting the gardens go fallow or become artificial and distant.

At the core of any culture is religion, pagan or Christian.  At the core of the anti-culture is an abstract individualism, abstract rights and the abstract state in which a notion of the “something” or God in and pushing through the created order is alien.

In the anti-culture the only subjugation is to the Hobbesian state which is an abstract corporation with a monopoly on coercion, with the ability to define the limits of its own power and driven by a powerful will, be that will one of a dictator, an oligarchy or even a democracy in which the masses are manipulated by the elites.  There is no subsidiarity and no communion; merely the collective of millions of autonomous individuals held in check by the coercive will of the state, perhaps - as it devalues currency and thereby dries up wealth, as it subsumes liberty, and as it further estranges with its intrusive policies husband and wife, parents and children, family and community - the ultimate vampire.  Jefferson Davis remarked in his address to the Mississippi Legislature in December of 1862 that “our enemies are a traditionless and homeless race.”

Jefferson Davis also, however, said the following, a message of hope: The principle for which we contend is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form.  Given the classical and Christian education of Jefferson Davis, it would be safe to conclude that his statement was not limited to the Confederacy, for the Confederacy was dead; and not to the South, for the South was prostrate.  Rather as he looked over the lost legacy of the Confederacy and the ruins of the South, it is quite likely that he saw the whole of Western culture as it was being devoured by the emerging Hobbesian state in Germany, in Italy and in America.  When our ancestors came to the New World and initially settled in Jamestown, Virginia; New Bern and Wilmington, North Carolina; Charleston, South Carolina; and Savannah, Georgia, they brought with them like a fragile plant the classical and Christian traditions which had been planted, grown and nurtured in Christian Europe, particularly in the British Isles.  They placed that plant in new soil and, therefore, in a new idiom; and then with Bible, with gun, with plow and with ax, they spilled out of those coastal cities and pressed westward to the Mississippi and beyond, into the far West.  It would appear, from the perspective of Modernity in the early 21^st century, that much of that good work has been lost, found like C.S. Lewis’ Old Narnia only in nooks and crannies, in enclaves and waning strongholds.  It has been overcome, or so it would seem, by the anti-culture, by the subsuming and consuming power of the Hobbesian state, and by demographic shifts, a form of war, which threatens to wipe all that has come to be over the last two thousand years away.

A Christian is, however, neither a pessimist nor an optimist; he is hopeful because he knows the Story to be true and the Story Teller to be even truer.  We must be like Leonidas at Thermopylae and see beyond the day and our own death; we must be like Arthur as he defended, seemingly in vain, the last vestiges of Christian Roman Britain; we must be like the Christian Saxon Earl Byrhtnoth who fought a losing battle against the pagan Danes at Maldon and take his words as the unknown poet smiths them to heart: Thought must be the harder, heart must be the keener, mind must be the greater, while our strength lessens.

It is fitting to close with an excerpt from The Free Magnolia, Volume 4, Number 1, a paragraph originally spontaneously produced during a discussion on the website of Chronicles Magazine.  This author penned the lines; but they were nurtured into The Free Magnolia by Dr. Clyde Wilson, the scholarly voice of our Southland:  The South is a garden. It has been worn out by the War, Re­construction, the Period of Desolation, the Depression and the worst ravages of all—Modernity; yet, a worn-out garden, its contours perceived by keen eyes, the fruitfulness of its past stored in memory, can be over time, a time which will last longer than those of us who initially set our minds to the task, restored, to once again produce, for the time appointed unto it, the fruits which nurture the hu­man spirit and which foreshadow the Garden of which there will be no end.

Works Cited

Alighieri, Dante. Divine Comedy. Trans. Gustave Doré and Anna Amari-Parker.  New York: Book Sales, Inc. 2008. Print.

Anonymous. “Battle of Maldon.” Late 11^th Century. Trans. Jonathan A Glenn. University of Central Arkansas: Department of English, 1982. Web.

Davis, Jefferson. “Jefferson Davis’ Speech at Jackson, Miss.” The Papers of Jefferson Davis. Rice University (MS-43):  Houston: Rice University Press. 2011. Web.

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature.  Norton, David Fate and Mary J. Norton, eds. Oxford University Press, 2001. Print.

Jenson, Robert W. “How the World Lost Its Story.” First Things.

                October 1993. Web.

Lewis, C.S.  The Abolition of Man. New York: HarperCollins, 1974. Print.

Livingston, Donald. “The First Conservative.” The American Conservative. 

                10 August 2011. Web.

Peters, Robert. “The South is a Garden.” The Free Magnolia 4:1 (2011): Killen, Alabama: The League of the South. Web.

Rieff, Philip. The Triumph of the Therapeutic. New York: Harper and Row,

                1965. Print.

Voegelin, Eric. Modernity without Restraint. Vol. 5. Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000. Print.

Dr. Robert Peters is a writer and teacher living in Fairview, Louisiana.  He received his B.A. in German from Louisiana College in Pineville, Louisiana; his M.A. in German from Southern Methodist University; and his Ph.D. in German from the University of Southern California. 

Dr. Peters has served as a civilian linguistic specialist for the United States Army, Europe, and for the 417^th Military Intelligence Battalion of the Louisiana National Guard.  He has also served in state-funded, public residential schools in Louisiana, Alabama and Arkansas.  He is currently the headmaster of Central School in Grand Cane, Louisiana.

He and his wife, Alice, own and live on a small thirty-acre farm.  The Peters have two children and three grandchildren.  The Peters are members of the Fairview Baptist Church.  Dr. Peters is the current commander of the Colonel Samuel D. Russell Camp #1617 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and is an associate of the Abbeville Institute.

Dr. Peters enjoys reading, writing short stories and sketches, and hiking.

A Real Polis?

Dr Thaddeus Kozinski offers a good essay to contemplate regarding the Occupy Wall Street movement at The Distributist Review, 'Victims of Mammon'.  He quotes Aristotle,

For if men met and associated out of regard to wealth only, their share in the state would be proportioned to their property, and the oligarchical doctrine would then seem to carry the day. It would not be just that he who paid one mina should have the same share of a hundred minae, whether of the principal or of the profits, as he who paid the remaining ninety-nine. But a state exists for the sake of a good life, and not for the sake of life only: …Nor does a state exist for the sake of alliance and security from injustice, nor yet for the sake of exchange and mutual intercourse… Whence it may be further inferred that virtue must be the care of a state which is truly so called, and not merely enjoys the name: for without this end the community becomes a mere alliance which differs only in place from alliances of which the members live apart; and law is only a convention, ‘a surety to one another of justice,’ as the sophist Lycophron says, and has no real power to make the citizens good and just.

Dr Kozinski then follows this by saying,

An alliance alone cannot make citizens good and just, and liberalism is an alliance pretending to be a polis, which is the worst of all options, worse than even a tyranny, for at least a tyranny is a genuine polis, albeit a defective one. As Alasdair MacIntyre has stated, when the state requires you to sacrifice your life in war, “It’s like dying for the telephone company.”

It may be inferred from the above (and from the rest of the essay) that until organic communities are again the norm, rather than agglomerations of isolated individuals, any efforts at reform - be they political, economic, or moral - are likely doomed to failure.  For the lone individual is powerless to effect change, and individuals with divergent religious, political, etc. views forced together into an artificial union (which is our current situation in the United States) will devour one another until that union either is dissolved or collapses.  From that point on, however, there is hope - hope that small, humanely-sized villages and towns rising from shared beliefs and grounded in the Church, extended family, small farms, and guilds of artisans and professionals will be the rule rather than the exception.


We in the United States are far from this ideal, living instead in the fake polis constructed and controlled by our corporate masters and their government servants (known at times as 'our' elected officials - representatives, presidents, governors, and so forth.), wherein most live a life without ever knowing the blessings of having roots in any one particular place, ready to move at a moment's notice to some new job in the vain hope of finding happiness in the salary offered to him by one faceless company or another. 

Whatever one may wish to say about the OWS crowds, good or bad, at some level they realise this to be true.  The sooner the rest of us awaken to it, the better off everyone will be.

A Call to Action

To a generation cowed into obedience to a corrupt, oppressive elite of academics, corporate executives, bankers, politicians, etc., Henry Timrod's 'Carolina' is a welcome antidote.  There is no need for armed battle, but we could gain much by taking to heart its underlying message:  the duty to put forward manly resistance to an enemy intent on doing us harm.

‘Carolina’

By Henry Timrod

                                I

The despot treads thy sacred sands,

Thy pines give shelter to his bands,

Thy sons stand by with idle hands,

                                 Carolina!

He breathes at ease thy airs of balm,

He scorns the lances of thy palm;

Oh! who shall break thy craven calm,

                                 Carolina!

Thy ancient fame is growing dim,

A spot is on thy garment's rim;

Give to the winds thy battle hymn,

                                 Carolina!

                                II

Call on thy children of the hill,

Wake swamp and river, coast and rill,

Rouse all thy strength and all thy skill,

                                 Carolina!

Cite wealth and science, trade and art,

Touch with thy fire the cautious mart,

And pour thee through the people's heart,

                                 Carolina!

Till even the coward spurns his fears,

And all thy fields and fens and meres

Shall bristle like thy palm with spears,

                                 Carolina!

                               III

Hold up the glories of thy dead;

Say how thy elder children bled,

And point to Eutaw’s battle-bed,

                                 Carolina!

Tell how the patriot's soul was tried,

And what his dauntless breast defied;

How Rutledge ruled and Laurens died,

                                 Carolina!

Cry! till thy summons heard at last,

Shall fall like Marion's bugle-blast

Re-echoed from the haunted Past,

                                 Carolina!

                                IV

I hear a murmur as of waves

That grope their way through sunless caves,

Like bodies struggling in their graves,

                                 Carolina!

And now it deepens; slow and grand

It swells, as, rolling to the land,

An ocean broke upon thy strand,

                                 Carolina!

Shout! let it reach the startled Huns!

And roar with all thy festal guns!

It is the answer of thy sons,

                                 Carolina!

                                V

They will not wait to hear thee call;

From Sachem's Head to Sumter's wall

Resounds the voice of hut and hall,

                                 Carolina!

No! thou hast not a stain, they say,

Or none save what the battle-day

Shall wash in seas of blood away,

                                 Carolina!

Thy skirts indeed the foe may part,

Thy robe be pierced with sword and dart,

They shall not touch thy noble heart,

                                 Carolina!

                                VI

Ere thou shalt own the tyrant's thrall

Ten times ten thousand men must fall;

Thy corpse may hearken to his call,

                                 Carolina!

When, by thy bier, in mournful throngs

The women chant thy mortal wrongs,

'T will be their own funereal songs,

                                 Carolina!

From thy dead breast by ruffians trod

No helpless child shall look to God;

All shall be safe beneath thy sod,

                                 Carolina!

                                VII

Girt with such wills to do and bear,

Assured in right, and mailed in prayer,

Thou wilt not bow thee to despair,

                                 Carolina!

Throw thy bold banner to the breeze!

Front with thy ranks the threatening seas

Like thine own proud armorial trees,

                                 Carolina!

Fling down thy gauntlet to the Huns,

And roar the challenge from thy guns;

Then leave the future to thy sons,

                                 Carolina!

(Note:  Henry Timrod's poems are now part of the public domain.  This poem is from the Nabu Press reprint of Poems of Henry Timrod, with Memoir and Portrait, memorial ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1899), pp. 141-4.  My thanks to the folks at the web site Poetry and Music of the War Between the States for providing a fairly good transcription of the poem online:  http://www.civilwarpoetry.org/confederate/thebreak/carolina.html)