What’s in a Game?

If you’re Yasunari Kawabata, the battle between tradition and modernity. 

Oh, you value the common good? NAZI!

After seeing a billboard a couple weeks back advertising Glenn Beck’s radio show (move over Rush, this guy gets FM), I decided to tune into 98.9, “The Big Talker,” yesterday.  You should tune in just once, so you can hear Beck’s promo clip, in which some sultry woman describes Beck as the “fusion of entertainment and enlightenment.”  Uh oh.  I listened on, and discovered that Beck was in unfortunately common form as he associated the concept of the “common good” with the ramp up to Nazism.  I didn’t catch what had set him off so much; it could have been Kagan, or Obama’s criticism of BP, or the latest perceived threats to his enormous ego.  But yesterday the common good was taking a beating.

According to now Dr. Beck (big surprise, Liberty), the rhetoric of the common good was an essential factor in moving Germany towards its extermination of undesirables like the mentally ill, the elderly, homosexuals, and, of course, European Jews.  Or rather, growth-towards-Nazism is an essential element of the “common good.”  Beck’s understanding of the efficient causes of the European genocide change pretty much everyday, but tend to drag a decent concept through mud every time.  The obvious irony is that yesterday Beck was appealing to the common good in all but name for virtually all of his pleas to save America.

It wasn’t very long after his tirade against the common good that he again attacked churches that preach “social justice,” and this time he lashed out at Jim Wallis.

Needless to say, it was one of those hysterical moments that ends up being cripplingly depressing.  I had to watch this video (again) to take the edge off.

A Statuary Shakedown

About a month ago, after a discussion of the controversy surrounding Davy Crockett’s death, I asked my students a question related the past in the public present.  At the University of Texas at Austin, there are a few statues of Confederate leaders.  Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis are the most notable figures, but most folks would need to read the weathered inscriptions on the statues of Albert Johnson and John Reagan to discover any connection to the controversy of having Confederates (and some alleged sympathizers) on campus.  Since every few years at UT there are movements to have the statues removed, I asked my freshmen (a group, admittedly, composed mostly of whites and Hispanics) whether they thought the statues should be removed.  The response was mostly in the negative.  Students seemed to know that these figures’ legacies were complicated, but thought that the statues should remain.

Bless You.

Here at Popery we’re not afraid of posting an obvious comment or two.  Now, having said that, I think whether anything I’ve said here hasn’t been obvious, but a few posts have been of some help.

An Overlooked Chronological Point

What’s the real difference between free market capitalism and communism?  Is it freedom versus equality?  Property versus community?  Excellence versus peace?

How about 72 years?

72 years between Adam Smith’s publication of The Wealth of Nations in 1776 and Marx’s of The Communist Manifesto in the revolution year of 1848. Apparently 72 years is enough of a time to think that the Republicans are upholding “conservative” values of moral society, while the pinko liberals are so current they’re out to destroy the fabric of society, a fabric, we’re led to believe, that’s hundreds upon hundreds of years old.

Free market capitalism, if we’re to seriously look at history and judge it against what free market types suggest, hasn’t really given us an instance of a successful free market society.  Similarly, we’ve never had a good example of a healthy communist society.  What each group says of the other—that it looks good on paper, but for X, Y, or Z—has to be said of both of them.

Interestingly enough, as I drove to work thinking these thoughts, my friend Ben was making some harmonious comments at Expensive Coffee.

Summer Reading 2010: Our Most Ambitious Plan, Ever.

I maxed out in 2008, when I somehow managed to go through 25 or so books.  Last summer I read around half as much, which has pained me for a while until now, when I can make it all better.  In an effort to avoid gazing at bookshelves wondering what to read next, I’m going to give my summer reading a little more structure.  Fiction reading is going to be at an all time low, and with an emphasis on the bizarre and grotesque.  Reading will center around classical and medieval text and histories, but a few contemporary philosophers are on the to-read shelf.  I’ll plow through Jon Meacham’s biography of Andrew Jackson as well.

Navigating Medieval Thought

I’ve just finished reading Rémi Brague’s The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Like other compilations of essays from a single author, some passages and some articles shine out much more than others.  The most important point, over the course of the entire book, is a point similar to the one he makes in Eccentric Culture, that the intellectual mode of Europeans was always one of appropriation and “inclusion”(via commentary), while other cultures “digested” (paraphrased and absorbed) other cultures, thereby eliminating the need original sources.  So what the medieval European “includes” remains entirely other, and a measure against which the European thinker may judge himself.

The essays in which Brague develops this point tend to be a little less impressive, and I look forward to reading Eccentric Culture to get a better idea of what Brague would have us learn from the philosophical developments of the Middle Ages.  But as far as Legend goes, my favorite essays discussed the “value” of an idea (a kind of cultural weight) in the different medieval cultures, the importance of flesh for molding medieval self-understanding, and the justifications for jihad by Muslim philosophers.  Another great essay centers on the concept that medieval geocentrism was, in reality, a humble view of the world, with some philosophers going so far as to describe the earth as a kind of cosmic dung heap.  Read a bit more about Brague on geocentrism on Wedgewords and a little about Calvin’s Aristotelian cosmology at Epistole.

I’ve also learned to avoid plowing through a book of essays in their consecutive order.  The amount of mental gear-shifting one has to do can be pretty painful.  I’ve got a few more essay compilations lined up for the summer, including Heiko A. Oberman’s The Dawn of the Reformation, so I’ll be sure to space that one out over a couple of weeks.

P.S.  Summer reading list coming soon.  In other words, nerd alert.

Heros novus meus?

If this guy doesn’t inspire you to achieve a goal, I don’t know what to tell you.

General Update #4

I’ve finished the Masters and it feels good.  The best part about it is that I get to read what I want without feeling guilty.  My time of furious summer reading (lots of medieval history) has already started and I’ve picked up my Wilding grammar book on Latin again, after dropping my studies for a couple of months.  I’ll post my intended reading list soon, but for now I’ll just hit you with some of my new favorite blogs.

An Open Letter to Anyone at The Economist (Y’all REALLY Need to Read This)

I grabbed my pimento cheese sandwich and some fresh brussels sprouts (for my third night in a row of making this fantastic recipe) at Central Market and made my way to the express checkout, where I was greeted by this atrocious magazine cover:

“The horror, the horror!” is right, but in this case it has nothing to do with the European economic meltdown.  If there’s a case for mixed visual metaphors as a term, this terribly photoshopped image (wait, why is the Acropolis lit up in front when then sun is behind it?) is exhibit A.  Who is Merkel supposed to be?  Brando or Sheen?  Maybe Hoffman?  At this point I have no clue and could use some illuminating comments from any readers.  And why are the helicopters flying over the Acropolis?  Greek don’t surf or something?

Whatever the cover’s intended meaning is, and it seems to suggest that something very, very bad is happening, it’s assembled so poorly that it detracts from all the significations deployed in trying to make the point.  The Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now are both resources for powerful symbols that might, somehow, have something to say to the current Greek crisis, but any symbolic value here is obscured by the fact that this image looks like it was made in fifteen minutes by some World of Warcraft player who loves posting his Frankenstein photoshopped images on Internet forums.

Usually I’m a fan of The Economist, and whenever I get their invitations to subscribe in the mail I tend to actually open the envelope and consider signing up.  After seeing this thing I’m glad I haven’t yet.  This is an image I will need to get over.

P. S.  I think I just moved a little bit closer to writing like David Bentley Hart.  That’s alright, I guess.  I’m not going to edit it out.