Optimist that I am, I say things have to get better, and we have to be there to make them better. We may not simply leave the white wall and hope it remains white. As Chesterton says, to keep a white wall in its integrity, you have to keep repainting it.

However, to execute this task, we need to note a few things. And attend to a few losses. For in the warmth of the discourse started by my article, a few people have observed that such inertia that young men have found themselves in as to wooing ladies may be accounted for by the loss of social institutions and customs which ought to lubricate the courting motions and dating rituals between boys and girls. As also Michael Foster (and his interlocutor) was keen to state in “Jack Reacher Won’t Ask Girls to Dance.

As the writer said, “Every species has mating rituals. If those mating rituals cannot be performed, they will not breed… In humans, these rituals are partially instinctive, but also must be adapted to culture, so parts of them must be learned.” And this is true. What we are experiencing are the throes of a deep loss —a loss of traditions.

Granted, men and boys ought to have vitality, powered by eros. Nonetheless, their vital eros must be shaped, honed, and formed by custom and culture. By the coming of age. By being weaned from Sarah and journeying with Abraham to Mount Moriah. Only then will he truly be the man he ought to be. However, we have relied on natural instinct too much, as if we are not rational beings in need of teaching. Thus, if there is any real failure, it will be with those who failed to teach young men to do what needs to be done.

Our current woes are the agonising terrors of the children at the cliff which the prescient Chesterton described years ago. We know Chesterton’s fence these days. Everyone has a sense of it. But we miss the importance of his walls. Chesterton says,

“We might fancy some children playing on the flat grassy top of some tall island in the sea. So long as there was a wall round the cliff’s edge they could fling themselves into every frantic game and make the place the noisiest of nurseries. But the walls were knocked down, leaving the naked peril of the precipice. They did not fall over; but when their friends returned to them they were all huddled in terror in the centre of the island; and their song had ceased.”

It is evident that our songs have ceased. Otherwise the article would not have resonated this much. But that is because the walls were knocked down and we are intimately aware of the naked peril of the precipice. What precipice? Well, the precipice of such blatant rejection and humiliation that men face when they woo women. Women too dread the embarrassment of being too forward. Men and women hug their respective aisles and won’t talk to each other in church —at least, not in the way that matters. The defining sentiment on both sides of the aisle is fear. Fear, for we lack walls.

We have lost the precise art of “the handkerchief.” That is, those dating rituals that allow a woman to signal that she is open to be courted, which allows the man to know when to approach, thus reducing the risk of such embarrassments on both sides.

These arts weren’t perfect. But they helped. Now we have none. Which brings upon us the curse that each boy and girl has to fend for themselves. We not only forgot that it takes a village to raise a child. The village, buying into the myth of autonomy, told the children to go raise themselves. Now the children are terrified and can’t find mates for themselves.

Some others have said that the world is all too fragmented to institute new rituals. Well, what are our options? To remain huddled in the middle of the park? So comes my call: are we instituting new walls, or do we want to nag ourselves and enjoy complaining about the problem? I am a bunker. I cannot go on debunking forever. We either build or exhaust ourselves whining. It is Nehemiah time. Let us develop new customs and dating rituals that we can teach our sons and daughters. Let us build walls for them.

For the coming instalments in this discourse, seeing that they will be more theologically themed and more ecclesially directed, I ask you to go over to the other shop dedicated to them. Thank you for reading.

Quodlibeta Notes On Christendom and Lebenswelt

Essays, experimental notes, and discussions on 'whatever' pertains to Christendom and the lebenswelt

By Emmanuel Jegede

These three notions are not unrelated. They are a diabolical trinity with their own diabolic mode of interpenetration for the purpose of inducing flaccidity in men’s will. If you think I am being enigmatic, what I mean is here made clear: all forms of digital algorithmic technology dispose men —the human male— to sloth and effeminacy.

Scrolling endlessly on Twitter is indistinguishable from scrolling porn sites endlessly as a matter of form. Everything is reduced to consumption. Endless consumption because of endless, effortless supply. In fact, absent a demand. The promise of the internet and all the algorithms is a bottomless supply of their goods. The particular goods themselves are irrelevant. Or rather, less relevant than the mode of supply. This way, young men are sterilised effectively. Because by removing friction, the incentive to labour and strive is removed. This is the simple philosophy of addiction, causatively—frictionlessness. When all friction is removed, striving soon follows. And where man needs to strive to grow, he is stunted. And sloth is the neglect of the will to begin a good. While effeminacy is the forsaking of good on account of sorrow and hardness involved in a good pursuit. Softness, so to speak. The inability to persevere. So, whereas sloth is the failure to begin, effeminacy is the failure usually to persevere.

Because of the promise of no friction and the removal of all need for striving by these algorithms, the algorithms begin to habituate the young man into this frame of mind. That is, into always expecting a promise of frictionlessness.

This explains the growing inability or unwillingness of young men to woo women. The latter being riddled with heavenward sparks of friction capable of starting fires. This avoidance of friction is manifest in the excuses: “we don’t want humiliation or embarrassment; she will tell her friends or post it on social media.” Which is all to say that there is real risk, rejection being the least, in approaching real women. This risk is removed with the digital harem. The pixel vixens have given themselves already. They are yours for the taking. They demand nothing exerting from you. Like the adulteress in Proverbs, they have set everything for you. Their words smoothingly invite you; their beds are covered with linen and perfumed with myrrh. Their husbands are not home —meaning there is no real danger lurking. It is just too easy. The young man has not to exercise himself in seduction to see if he can make a woman melt into him. All the lack of friction. And to heaven, women want to be seduced. It is natural law that they be seduced.

This avoidance is not strictly sexual. But it is growing existential leaps. To avoid friction, men go out of their way to dodge confronting women —the women in their lives first of all, and other women at large. They allow them to do as they please to ensure there are no sparks. They won’t speak the truth and execute justice in the hopes that maybe they’d get “favours” —whether with their wives or with dishonest women. Nothing encapsulates this spineless habit in the contemporary man more than the “happy wife, happy life” mantra, wedded to the “disgruntled wife makes husband sleep on the couch” so advertised in popular media nowadays. The men are doormats, with molluscs for spines. They offer no challenge, no thrill, no guidance, no leadership. They follow the undiscerning whims of the women, assent to their every decision. In short, they repeat Adam’s sins.

If all sin is hatred of God and neighbour, Adam displayed his hate towards God by blatantly disobeying a clear command. He, however, also demonstrated how much he hated his neighbour by consenting to and approving of Eve’s crime by offering no resistance. Eve was his neighbour, and he watched her sin. But not only did he not stop her, he also followed her in it. Whatever you think of the Edenic myth, whether it is accurate history or symbolic, the symbolism stands. In the woman we see vanity. In the man we see cowardice.

The sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve have not fully broken free of their parents’ sins. The women are still vain, wanting above all else the power of choice. Whether this choice is for good or ill is less relevant than the fact that they want choice at all costs —including the brute choice to kill their offspring in the womb.

And the men: they stand by and let things happen. They offer little to no resistance. Like Cain, they declare — with their actions and not their lips—that “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain being a fitting descendant of Adam. The son followed after his father. And the pattern ensues to this day. It is the mark of the current Western decadence: women want to go their way, and men simply assent and refuse to engage. For fear of losing favours with the ladies, in whatever mode or stripe. Even clergymen hesitate to address the sins peculiar to women. They do so with fourteen hedges, a thousand qualifications, and a million apologies. They strike hard at men —even on Father’s Day— but are as soft as marshmallows when it comes to the sins that corrode the female constitution. (It is even a taboo these days to say that women owe the world babies.) All is geared towards frictionlessness. This is the world we live in now.

And for all these, women are not happy. They may be emotionally elated for a while, but they are existentially miserable. And this is not out of order. Pain is a sign that something and some thing is broken and wrong.

So, emotionally, women may be placated when their fathers, husbands, brothers, and male friends just turn over like puppies or play dead when they want to go the wrong way. They may experience some delight when men offer no resistance to their desire to dress like harlots, be loud and defiant; they may for a moment feel loved when no one reminds them of their womanly duty to the world and the people around them. But they are never really happy —as in having beatitudo as minimally as possible— when the order of the cosmos breaks. The advantage is only apparent until the horn of existential disadvantage laughs eerily into view.

This angst that women feel, they feel it everywhere. At home, in the churches, on the streets. They feel it when they realise that men are reticent to protect them when it matters most. And I here do not speak of white knights who swoop to the aid of the distressed damsel with, again, hopes of favours or salvaging a reputation. Who defend women both in their rights and wrongs. Who, being enemies to these women’s souls, kiss them, rather than wound them as a friend. For better is a friend’s wound than an enemy’s kiss. I mean that when the stakes are high, such as when the woman’s soul and not simply her body is in danger, men shy away.

Women express this angst in romance. For they yearn to be thrilled and courted. And this is good actually. They want to be desired. And this is not evil in itself. This is simply the principle of motion toward conjugality. But then the men buck. And shy away. And stick to the walls like flies rather than walk to the lady and sweep her off her feet. They are in their Instagram private messages, performing all manner of conversational magic, but they would not dare to speak to them in person when they see each other in church. Those women willing and daring enough to say it will affirm.

The complaints are not diminished when they are married. Women do not cease to be women after marriage. They do not want to be any less beautiful or desired. They want the thrill still, to any degree it can be managed. Even if it is not all the time. So they lament when it doesn’t happen. And they complain often that the men are not taking initiative. Everyone is miserable. When any gender fails, we all lose.

Wives still complain that husbands are not leading. They are phlegmatic and indecisive. They want to do nothing but hide away. They call no shots, make no huge decisions, offer no direction, vision, and governance. The women take this up. But not being made for it, you can see their frame yield under the weight. And God help them if they have sons.

But that is that for the ladies. To return to the focal object, the male, he shies away out of fear. Or he yields to a nagging woman. A father wants to protect his daughter from the beauty industry’s vampirism, which sucks away at the sanguine blood of young women’s self-image and esteem. But who does he meet as the big bad gatekeeper? His wife. And he is unable to press on because he lost the battle decades ago.

He lost the battle when he conceded, upon an overextended frame of equality, his rulership over his wife. He ceded his place as governor of his realm. He yielded, in his mind, that he and his wife are interchangeable save for physiology. He has become, quite symbolically, a spiritual homosexual. And neutered as well, this time, by the castrating power of the state.

Not a particular problem on my side of the world. But Western nations whose progressive culture has begun to make its way into African territory have courts that give the mother rights to make gendered Frankenstein monsters out of their kids while the father looks on helplessly. The State assumes the surrogate husband for that particular daughter of Eve. And the State, wanting no friction, yields like the largest jelly in existence. It is all frictionlessness.

We have become, by means of technological output, a really efficient society. But efficiency at the expense of the good friction required for the soul’s growth, which keeps the spirit in the species alive. The internet and its algorithms proliferate this habit in our male species as well.

Which is why I have always insisted that the falling birthrate problem is spiritual, not economic. By spiritual I mean pertaining to the human spirit primarily. But secondarily, I mean also the particular operations of malicious spirits and demons who, hating all that God has made, seed destructive ideas into the world to cause the creature made in God’s own image to harm itself.

So, if pornography is marked by frictionlessness, and our current society is marked by frictionlessness, it is not out of place, as metonymy, to say that our society is Pornographic as well. Everything not only is frictionless, but transparent as well. We want to see through everything and be in on everything. The constant rush for information of all kinds, which does nothing for us but keep us in the know, is analogous to pornography. The swipe-easy algorithms; that finger motion that does not distinguish between the various types of applications is habituating us to the Pornographic way of life.

Yet, nothing spells that all of the current world is Pornographic more than the fact that we have “porn” pages that have nothing at all to do with graphic sexual imagery, but are of some other item put on display for consumption.

So, you have “Cat Porn” pages, “Interior Decor Porn” pages, “Food Porn” pages, and so on, whose entire project is to expose you to exhibits of cats, dogs, furniture, and food; to titillate you and excite you. To lure you into mindless but intangible consumption. You can see but not touch and have. Nothing is more pornographic than that.

We have become efficient. But at the expense of the soul’s need for friction. The world is now a global village. And the animating spirit of this village is endless, frictionless consumption. All now is pornography. And the men have got voluntile dysfunction and a flaccidity of will. The world is sick. And not for the first time. But this is our world, our time, our sickness. God save our souls.

And your meme: Good morning, sunshine, the Sun says, “salut!”

Feeling wise, join me at my other shop. I might do a theological version of the same theme. Until next time.

Quodlibeta Notes On Christendom and Lebenswelt

Essays, experimental notes, and discussions on 'whatever' pertains to Christendom and the lebenswelt

By Emmanuel Jegede

One might say various things these days about the decline and decay of modern education; how fine, honest, and true ideas are increasingly scarce. We might speak of such things as capitalism, lack of funding, scientism, and utilitarianism as cankers eating out the soul of modern education from the inside and outside. Were I to commission various sociologists to study the matter, they might produce an encyclopedia of ills and causes as to why education and intellectual work have gone to dung; remembering also the stultification that comes behind bigoteering and all forms of grievances disguised as scholarship. These and many more are the obvious villains staring down the sort of intellectual work that refreshes the soul and vitalises generations. Not one sociologist, if I am confident, will point to the excision of true friendship as one of those villains terrorising education today.

It was right there all along. I could smell it. But it did not hit me afresh again until it had all coalesced once more, how friendships fructified some sound work.

Without speaking to the mechanism as to how friendships fertilise sound intellects, I shall name a few that come to mind at the moment, of great examples, in philosophy and theology, of works we are privileged to have, because friends placed requests on friends to do the work.

Beginning with Averroes’ commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge, I have it on good record that Averroes was not very pleased to write it. He did not consider Porphyry’s text to be a proper introduction to the art of logic, and he also thought it was lucid and self-explanatory. Why did he write it anyway? Because his friends asked and insisted. They wanted him to write a commentary for them. Maybe they didn’t understand it, and entrusted themselves to his towering acuity. As such, they, our now noble friends from Murcia, begged him to comment on the work. So, whatever we have now from such, whatever benefit, whatever clarity, we owe it to the power of friendship.

It gets interesting right after this request from the friends from Murcia. For the reason that the work which they begged the great Averroes to comment on, Porphyry’s Isagoge itself, was penned by the author as an introduction to Aristotle’s Categories (‘Isagoge’ means introduction) to his friend Chrysaorius. The opening text reads thus:

“To understand Aristotle’s Categories, Chrysaorius, one must know the nature of genus, difference, species, property, and accidents. This knowledge is also useful for giving definitions and generally for division and demonstration. I shall make for you a concise review of this traditional teaching as befits an introduction and try to recount what our predecessors said.” (Emphasis mine)

Need I comment anything more? (Maybe when my friends ask for it.) But there is something historically cheeky in this that two works of commentary, linked to one another as like a chain, were called to life by the power of friendship. The meme is true after all, and the meme-maker is a philosopher hiding in plain sight. We owe many things to friendship, and yet we do not think last of friendship, speak less of thinking of it at all, when we consider revitalising education.

Once, a friend asked me if I had seen Dead Poets Society. I responded that I had. And in my quick manner added an answer to a question not (yet) asked: that I didn’t like John Keating, the “O Captain, My Captain” teacher who every teenager bursting with adolescent romanticism fancies as a teacher. I didn’t like him; he was a villain, and that was that.

In consistent fashion, this friend retorted that I, with my love of rules and formality, offered no surprises here, and she was sure that I preferred the other teachers who were stern, rigid, and might I say insipid in their manner of teaching. I denied. I didn’t like those teachers either. Nor did I like the parents. If the said movie had any merit, it is surely an unintended merit of demonstrating everything wrong with modern education: the parents who latch on to education for their children for purely economic and utilitarian gains, joyless teachers, and a romanticist villain of a teacher. In a nutshell, the parents had no noble vision of education, the knowledgeable teachers provided no warmth or intimacy for the boys to incubate their aptitude, and the only teacher warm enough to do so gave the boys zero working material to fertilise their intellect.

On this last point, I shall comment a little more thus. That warmth and intimacy are not enough for true intellectual work. The warmth and intimacy true friendship provides, while they are necessary ingredients for the kind of intellectual exercise that shoots through ages like Odysseus’ arrow, are not sufficient. Friendship is a fertile soil and not the seed. Unless you plant the seeds of rigorous scholarly work, the fertile soil of friendship can bear no fruit at all. Mr Keating failed his students by stimulating them without filling them with the texts and knowledge of classical authors that could make the boys, in fact, carpe diem. Aside from a few poems here and there, these boys were agitated, invigorated, but without content for their minds to grind. All stimulated for nothing. This is John Keating’s villainy. For every serious scholar knows, as he grows up, that what he misses the most are the parts of his childhood education that he took with levity. How lovely it would be if a scholar had learned his Greek and Latin quite well when he was a schoolboy. This is the stuff of regrets; the kind of thing John Keating brings.

I contrast Mr Keating with John Cleese’s Mr Edly in Spud. A struggling alcoholic, Mr. Edly spotted the spuddy John Milton who was the only student to get above a fifty percent in a class assignment on the great influences on modern literature and took an interest in the young man, making him wait after class, offering him Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, forbidding the young man to say an outright thank you but instead, “read it and tell me what you think.” Afterwards, he invited the young man to his own home, shared a meal with him, a glass of wine, and took him to his book-stacked study to furnish him with a new book for the young mind to chew on, namely Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Summarily, even though Mr Edly was an alcoholic who nearly destroyed his marriage via his bottle habit, he was a friend for the growing mind of John ‘Spud’ Milton. This is what Mr Keating failed to be.

On the education of the young and the power of friendship for the life of the mind, these two coincide in Marcus Fabian Quintillian’s Institutes of Oratory. The preface to the treatise is aptly titled “Duty to Friends.” He wrote,

“Having at length, after twenty years devoted to the training of the young, obtained leisure for study, I was asked by certain of my friends to write something on the art of speaking. For a long time, I resisted their entreaties, since I was well aware that some of the most distinguished Greek and Roman writers had bequeathed to posterity a number of works dealing with this subject, to the composition of which they had devoted the utmost care…I was moved to comply not so much because I felt confidence that I was equal to the task, as because I had a certain compunction about refusing. The subject proved more extensive than I had first imagined; but finally I volunteered to shoulder a task which was on a far larger scale than that which I was originally asked to undertake. I wished on the one hand to oblige my very good friends beyond their requests, and on the other to avoid the beaten track and the necessity of treading where others had gone before.”

Dedicating this work to Marcellus Victorius, he says of him that,

“You have been the truest of friends to me and you have shown a passionate enthusiasm for literature. But good as these reasons are, they are not the only reasons that lead me to regard you as especially worthy of such a pledge of our mutual affection. There is also the consideration that this book should prove of service in the education of your son Geta, who, young though he is, already shows clear promise of real talent.”

Out of which came afterwards, six hundred pages of an exceptional work of pedagogy and rhetoric which would be valuable even to our day.

Remembering that he initially “resisted their entreaties,” one —such as myself— wonders how many works of great quality have gone silent to the grave and dark night because they had no friend who could compel them out of their potential authors, or the author was so buried in a low estimation of himself that even his friends could not shake him out of such beliefs. Praise heavens, the converse is the case with Quintillian. Also, this moral is clear from the circumstance: the courage it takes to step out of oneself to meet the needs of others is the source of all great things. For greatness is marked by service; although it might be shrouded in giftedness.

This is not true only of philosophy, but also of literature. This I might mention in brief. As Tolkien said two years after the death of C.S. Lewis, “But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more, I should never have brought The Lord of the Rings to a conclusion.” Of their friendship, Alister McGrath comments that “He [Tolkien] was a man of immense creativity who nevertheless needed someone to affirm him in what he was writing—and, more important, persuade him to finish it.” As one commenter says, Lewis was the midwife to Tolkien’s brainchild, helping to bring it to light.

It is uncanny as well that The Lord of the Rings followed the story of a fellowship, friends by another name. And ends with two Hobbits labouring to reach Mount Doom to cast the ring into the fires from which it was forged. And dramatically, this line features in the book, from the able Samwise Gamgee the brave: “‘Come, Mr Frodo!’ he cried. ‘I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you and it as well.” Which, for most times in the intellectual life, is the true spirit of friendship: your friend may not have your particular gift, and may not therefore be able to carry the particular burdens this gift places on you. But they can carry you through all the labours to which your natural talents call you. This, the power of friendship.

Of theology, the sentiment is true as well. I take for my case study in this area, the great Bishop of Lyons, St. Irenaeus. In his Against Heresies, that extensive corpus against the Gnostics, he writes in the preface thus:

“Lest, therefore, through my neglect, some should be carried off, even as sheep are by wolves, while they perceive not the true character of these men,— because they outwardly are covered with sheep's clothing (against whom the Lord has enjoined Matthew 7:15 us to be on our guard), and because their language resembles ours, while their sentiments are very different—I have deemed it my duty (after reading some of the Commentaries, as they call them, of the disciples of Valentinus, and after making myself acquainted with their tenets through personal intercourse with some of them) to unfold to you, my friend, these portentous and profound mysteries, which do not fall within the range of every intellect, because all have not sufficiently purged their brains. I do this, in order that you, obtaining an acquaintance with these things, may in turn explain them to all those with whom you are connected, and exhort them to avoid such an abyss of madness and of blasphemy against Christ.”

In his Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching, the same great Bishop addresses to Marcianus thus:

“Knowing, my beloved Marcianus, your desire to walk in godliness, which alone leads man to life eternal, I rejoice with you and make my prayer that you may preserve your faith entire and so be pleasing to God who made you. Would that it were possible for us to be always together, to help each other and to lighten the labour of our earthly life by continual discourse together on the things that profit. But, since at this present time we are parted from one another in the body, yet according to our power we will not fail to speak with you a little by writing, and to show forth in brief the preaching of the truth for the confirmation of your faith.”

This case is clear and needs no further demonstration. As such, I deem it proper and befitting to round up this cake I have been baking and to put the icing on the cake. And there is no better icing for this cake than from scripture itself. For as we know, the gospel according to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles were written accounts from Luke to “O Theophilus.” He writes in Luke 1 that,

“Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.”

The case, to my mind, is fairly established as to how this sense of the personal, this incubator of friendship, this womb of warm feeling, this intimacy of Watsons and Holmes is missing and is consequently in need of a revitalisation in our current project of education and the intellectual life. Were I to admonish, here is what I would say: dear man of letters, abolish the desire to write for the world; snuff out the vision of changing the world, write for your friend; break your back in your study, ruin your body, spend your money, just so you can do the one very noble task of writing for your friend. Write for your friend.

I wish to say thank you to all the friends of The Busymind Project for calling me to do my best. Here is your meme

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Quodlibeta Notes On Christendom and Lebenswelt

Essays, experimental notes, and discussions on 'whatever' pertains to Christendom and the lebenswelt

By Emmanuel Jegede

Valete!

Under a tent on a green field in a University campus, sick, I checked my phone to confirm that Arsenal had defeated Chelsea to win the Europa League trophy at Baku. To my biggest disappointment, Chelsea had humiliated us four goals to one. I was so sure the trophy was ours.

Why? Because our manager —Unai Emery— was something of a Europa League expert if I may say so myself, having done it with Sevilla a few times, even consecutively. As well as having a smooth run in the lead to the final, Arsenal gliding away with victories home and away, with the Laca-Auba pairing having fun and a hat-trick on the journey. Chelsea, on the other hand, had crawled to Baku with draws and penalties. Surely this was our moment to get something a tad larger than the staple FA cups. But no, 4-1.

My stomach sank. My already sick self got sicker. This was a tragedy. And the bitter gall atop the bitter pie? I got bad food that night. Only Job had it worse than me that night. My soul broken, hope lost, I silently kept Arsenal —a club of which I had been a fan for about 15 years at the time— in the recesses of my heart. I grew tepid. I couldn’t be disappointed if I had no expectations.

Or so I thought: for in December 2019, on my bunk bed in my dark, powerless room on the same campus, I kept checking to see Carabao cup updates. Liverpool against Arsenal; that dark jersey with the neon parts. The goals from Lucas Torreira, a young Gabriel Martinelli, Ainsley Maitland-Niles, Joe Willock, and the marvellous Ozil gameplay. We lost on penalties to Liverpool. So, yes, I was not done with Arsenal yet. Hope was not dead. It was aflame. I saw those young lads —Martinelli especially— hold the fort. And I thought, “Let’s go again.”

Fast forward to August 1, 2020, we secured another FA Cup. Over Chelsea. It was something, but not the sick and sweetest revenge I had hoped. We lost a big one to them, and the gash was still fresh. Even as I write. The FA Cup, however, cemented the beginning of the Mikel Arteta reign.

Not the sweetest reign, mind you. Oh no, not at all. For Arsene “The Professor” Wenger had spoiled us back in the day with top-four Champions League finishes. However poor we were with Chamakh, Bendtner, Frimpong, and that era, we would always have UCL nights to battle with the big shoulders of Europe. Except, of course, the professor’s final season, where we finished sixth.

Which was why Emery’s fifth and then eighth —after which Ljunberg took over in the interim— horrified me. This was not my club. Then Arteta picked up at eighth and finished eighth in his first season. Then finished eighth the next season again. What horror. But where can a lad go? Definitely not Chelsea or anywhere else. But so began the ascent.

No one knows better than the lifelong Arsenal fan what it means that “it is the hope that kills.” For all the fans had, season after season, as we finished second in the last three seasons, was hope. And they quickly learn the lesson that if you have no hope, you cannot be killed. But being blockheads, the lesson never sticks. And that is where the fun is.

And Arsenal’s rivals enjoy this hope that the fans have. In fact, for all their joylessness, they have sought Arsenal’s misery for amusement. And I don’t mind: hate on, it is part of the beautiful game. For if one must hate on a rival, it is sportsmanlike to be brazen about the hate. Veiling the hate in some noble alloy is just dishonest and disgusting. It is the stuff of Satan. If one must hate well, then he must hate without a reason. Which is why I am incensed when some fellows with vocal cords say that they do not want Arsenal to win the league because Arsenal fans are arrogant. Pressing upon such a one as to whether this was a trait specific to Arsenal fans, apart from any fanbase, I got stammers and quivers. His talk was easily dissolved by a syllogism —what bollocks he uttered.

No, the rivals hate to see Arsenal win because they are unwilling to part with their unreluctant banter-things. And that is welcome; we charge it to the game. Spare me the ‘reason’ fella, you have none. Which is why the most hurtful banter dart — “why argue with an Arsenal fan when you can just wait” —was also the most honest. No pretences, just sheer mockery. And it hurt.

And it may start to get to you as a fan. Baku, 8-2, 89 points, Carabao final, Wenger’s 1,000th game, 10-2. It starts to seep into your bones. Where then you ask yourself, as a fan, “why celebrate now when I can just wait to see how it all turns out.” That is, the need to play it safe to avoid eventual banters, while hoping that it is all worth it when you finally cash it in.

But I ask, “Why wait to celebrate when nothing is promised?” Why celebrate anything at all? Why celebrate the opening goal when things can so swing around? Why not wait until the final whistle to eventually experience joy? Why let future joy or sorrow rob you of present joy and sorrow? Didn’t you learn as a child that one goal in hand is worth a thousand xG?

The reason we celebrate this one is that it is all we have for now. You don’t suddenly recover all the joys you let pass because you got this one-time heavy deposit of joy. At best, the current heavy deposit compensates you for the memory of the joys you let slip. It may suffice, seemingly, but it is undeniable that you had zero contact with those joys. You never touched them, lived them, experienced them. All you have left are phantoms and memories, but not the real thing. This is simple phenomenology. In hoping for what is coming, you absented the moment. This is not the way to live.

We live by living. In the moment. By making ‘mindless’ contact with sensible reality. And that is how we hope. We hope by living in the moment. We don’t hope by simply ‘hoping.’ We hope by living; by doing the next thing. By celebrating the next goal and mourning the current loss. We hope by being alive and awake through the motions of life as we march. This is what Arsenal fans have learned.

The joke is quite the staple now, of course. That if you want a loyal husband or mate, get an Arsenal fan. He will, the trope says, stay with you through thick, thin, rain, drought, many, nothing, day, and decade. Trophy or not, they will be there. But most importantly, they are not lax, latent, or passive. Rather, they will stay with you full of optimism, telling you that “this is our season.” Somehow, the hope that kills never kills them. Why? Because of love, the hope they have never disappoints (Romans 5:5). (For sports as well, is reducible to theology).

Arsenal fans may rejoice in their sufferings, because they know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character, and character, hope. In loving the bleeding heart of North London, the fans have learned to suffer. To persevere. To hope.

Beauty and class drew them to the club. And they loved her. And even when things dwindled, they loved her. But they didn’t abandon her when things started to shrink. They stood, and waited for the gaffer to come improve her. She was their Rome, once great. Now less great. But great she is becoming again, because they loved her.

They have fattened her. And now she no longer shrinks nor baulks at the banter. She now has weight, girth, and core once more. The players understood the assignment and went to task. They threw bodies on the line to keep her fat: that Calafiori block, Gabriel’s head, Raya’s saves, Martinelli’s runs, Odegaard’s passes, and Declan Rice’s tireless labours in the 98th minute. Through thick and thin, they swore that the fans deserved better. They chose her at her worst and dressed her back to her best. Having gained the necessary weight, the Red Lady of North London has recovered her voice.

Of Arsenal, it was said that “next season is always their season.” Twenty-two years without a league title does that to a base. They took it in stride. So, for twenty-two long years, on the subject of our league hope, the jury was out, and the church was still in session. Until last night.

With the fat lady waiting for things to come to a close, Lady Fortuna moved things around; things named Everton and Bournemouth; Moyes and Iraola —Arteta’s former manager and his ex-teammate and childhood acquaintance, respectively. And then, the moment of truth, to which all who hoped by living in the moment hoped, came. The fat lady sang, and Arsenal are the champions of England. You deserve this one, lads. COYG!!!

And so she sits

Too often, what is absent in our considerations is absence itself, of which its effects are hard felt by us. For very often, when we say someone is an extremist at something, what we really mean is that he is a monomaniac. That is, he focuses on one thing to the detriment of many things. In short, what looks like extremism is very often a dedicated one-trick poniness. Or a one-minded one-kick Bruce Lee-ness.

More often than not, we ought to be considering, not what is before our eyes, but what is away from our eyes. Not what there is, but what is absent from where it ought to be.

When we say, for instance, that someone speaks rashly, we are remiss to say that the person lacks good rhetorical ability. We say instead that he is just a wicked person willing to injure with the truth. If at all, we even acknowledge that he might be hitting on something right.

Back to the extremist. The extremist is hardened by absence. For the problem with the extremist is not his focus. It is good to be focused. It is his lack of distraction. It is not his seriousness that is his illness; it is his lack of play. Which is why Jack is dull: he is all work and no play. The extremist too, is all bulk and no hay. And that is why, as a master of one, Jack is dull still.

Caesar —or is it Shakespeare the bard?— knew this of Cassius, and says,

He reads much,
He is a great observer, and he looks
Quite through the deeds of men. He loves no plays,
As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music;
Seldom he smiles, and smiles in such a sort
As if he mocked himself and scorned his spirit
That could be moved to smile at anything.
Such men as he be never at heart’s ease
Whiles they behold a greater than themselves,
And therefore are they very dangerous.

The problem was never observation, nor reading books, nor being perspicacious about the deeds of men. At least not directly. Rather, it is that he loves no plays and hears no music. As the bard says also of Shylock,

The man that hath no music in himself, 
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, 
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night, 
And his affections dark as Erebus. 
Let no such man be trusted. Mark the music.”

The man who observes and thinks about the world, who sees it in its nakedness, is not the problem. For truly, both the mild man and the extremists see the same thing. However, the mild man still sees some beauty and enjoys the concord of sweet sounds. He is still able to enjoy plays and nursery rhymes and is not totally repulsed by cartoons. He is still able to enjoy parties and the fruit of the vine. Whereas, the extremist is always doing it business. Therefore, it is not what they have in common, but what the latter lacks that makes him repugnant to others’ cheerful mien.

Even so, with virtue. A virtue is easily a vice when it is missing other virtues. Cowardice is only prudence absent courage. And recklessness is courage minus temperance. Virtue is only as virtuous as the proportions of all virtues present within the matrical set.

I suppose another way to say it is that sometimes moderation is not a matter of subtraction but of addition. Or subtraction by addition: the solution to speaking the truth with love is not less truth but more love. That is, as much love as there is truth. And the solution to mushy sentimentality is not less affection but better judgment. If the soul is like a chariot driven by horses, you don’t need fewer stallions but more; the stallions of truth and love.

The same with doctrine and heresy. Sometimes it is not what is said. But what is not said. A doctrine may be defective because parts have become wholes, to the detriment of other parts. As with love and altruism. The latter says love is all about the other. And does this to the detriment of justice to the self. Objectification is not about loving something too much. It is about not loving it wholly; that is, leaving out parts to be loved.

It is not that history has not been characterised by class struggles. It is that it has not been characterised solely by class struggles. It is not that too much of everything is bad. It is that too little of everything else is bad.

Or for a stiff aristocracy. It is not that they have become stiffened by politeness, manners, and courtesies. It is that they have lost touch with mud, lack of bread, foul breath, and popular humour. And the bourgeoisie Gatsby, the archetype of the uncivilised rich man: it is not that he had too much money. It is that he has no manners and definitely no aristocratic cultivation. He throws money at everything but is totally dead to the sense that he has no noble affectation to him, just gruffs and greens.

It is not that Jesus is a lamb. It is that we have forgotten that He is also the Lion of the tribe of Judah. The problem is not that we misrepresent Jesus as a servant, especially a suffering, humiliated servant. It is that we forget to represent Him as the Almighty God. The problem is not that He came as a squiggly baby. But that we forget to say that while in that manger, He held all things together by the word of His power.

Maybe the problem is not that we terrify sinners with the coming wrath of God. But that we fail to tell them that separation from the source of true good is already the present wrath of God.

These are various cases where the problem is not an extreme presence. Rather, it is an extreme absence. Not maybe that the chef lied in the cookbook. But we lack the chef’s trained intuition for salting food.

Let us subtract things by adding. And make them soft by complements. And distinguish by absences and presences. In other words, the sic et non model of cataloguing propositions rests on presence and absence.

We can see, for instance, that the presence of natural gregariousness makes Christianity affirm the individual but deny individualism. And by the presence of the unique individual soul in its relation to God, it affirms the community of people while denying the communism of Marx. In other words, two things may seem uncannily alike. But by some present or absent thing, we can point and say, “distinguo.”

Valete, amici.

Are we back?

Generating ideas is easy. Discussing them is pleasurable. Like conjugal relations, the mental romp titillates; and even better, unlike its more carnal analogue, can be had in public view. Even more pleasurable is the act of critiquing or “debunking” this and that philosophy, this and that ideology; dismantling this and that ‘system.’

It gets darker, grimmer, and more solemn, however, when the time comes to build and execute on those ideas. Especially if they must be lived and brought to life. For like a woman who risks death to bring life to the world, one must risk one’s own life and death to enact one’s vision on the world. Conjugal relations might be a fifteen-minute slice of heaven. But gestation and parturition threaten the woman’s life. Similarly, a Monty Python match between the Greeks and the Germans might prove the most exciting thing to behold. But of what proceeds from there, the cost and the consequences of the ideas must be borne. Very few people, as I have come to see, understand, as they enjoy darting ideas into the world, that ideas not only have consequences but costs.

My exhortation is here pointed at those who would generally call themselves conservatives —usually political conservatives and simply temperamental ones. My charge here to them is properly summarised in Sir Roger Scruton’s (1944-2020) playful quip that “we can’t be about ‘debunking’. Rather, we need ‘bunking’.” A cheerful but penetrating response. For its inverse depicts what is fairly the case among conservatives.

If the conservatives will have any feather at all on their hats, even if they did nothing to earn it except by an accident of temperament, it is that the conservatives are right. At least, on the basic facts of the human experience, which are true and timeless for all human entities and all cultures everywhere. There are a number of these things that the conservative can nail as right to his hat without much effort, apart from simply receiving them.

But where they are right, they lack the aptitude to build. We often find missing the competence to use the tools so-received to preserve and transmit any real and positive change. For the conservative’s greatest blessing and curse is the desire to be left alone. This, as well, they hold in common with the libertarians.

It is not unfair to compare conservatives with Hobbits, both positively. For it is in the general character of the latter to be an “unobtrusive and ancient people,” who “love peace and quiet and a well-tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favourite haunt.” Who also do not “understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools.” In their love of peace and quiet, they have also mastered the “art of disappearing swiftly and silently.” Such is the conservative.

All these things are good qualities. But only if the time is right; right for true levity and cheerfulness and the love of everyday things. For as Gandalf commends about the Hobbits, they “will sit on the edge of ruin and discuss the pleasures of the table, or the small doings of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, and remoter cousins to the ninth degree, if you encourage them with undue patience.” And certainly, there is something divine in being able to sit on the edge of ruin and discuss the pleasures of the table. It does no one good to be buried under dark brooding in the face of ruin. If the world be dark, let our spirits be light —light both in the sense of illumination and levity. For joy, truly, is strength. So, this credit should be awarded when due to those who have the habit.

However, those who want peace must also prepare for war. Prepared to defend this peace and nearness to vegetation that they so cherish. They must be prepared to preserve and transmit the idyllic life to their progeny. Or else, they are nothing other than Onan, who enjoys the pleasure of conjugal relations with his dead brother’s wife but ultimately wastes his seed to avoid raising an inheritance for his brother. Onan is an archetype of selfishness whose judgment was rightly deserved. The conservative who is unwilling to build flirts always with the archetypal judgement of Onan; but even worse, he refuses to leave an inheritance for his own children.

To then keep pointing to one’s rightness about things without digging to transmit the goods of the human soul, which endures, is to enjoy the pleasure while avoiding the cost that counteracts that pleasure and prevents it from being unbounded. In this way as well, the conservative swims like a spiritual libertine and is graded worse —because of a matter of the realm of his libertinism— than the merely sexual libertine. It is good for a man to pay the cost of the bread. And he pays the cost by paying it forward, as it was done for him.

In an expert shell of his regular genius, Chesterton outlines the true task of the conservative:

“All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post.”

I have also observed that when the conservative is not winning, he tends to be whining. He also seems to enjoy whining. And this is its own species of Onanism as well. But even a more frustrating type. For it never delivers any true satisfaction apart from getting one teased and on edge endlessly. I liken it to getting teased at a strip club. That much talk and lament about how bad things are, and debunking but with no real steps of action and ‘bunking’ is the mental equivalent of ‘blue balls’ without consummation and relief. Debunking is not sustainable. We must get to ‘bunking.’

If all the sexual imagery leaves you uncomfortable, consider that the intellectual life may be considered not really in sexual, but erotic terms. The carnal and spiritual are analogues.

But most importantly, this essay is dedicated to Sir Roger Scruton, one of the greatest conservative minds of the 20th century, who would have been 82 today. May the good Lord bless the memory of the great man.

Requiescat in pace, Sir Roger.

And many other things. For of the many gifts of life, including life itself, it seems to me that the gift of silence is not accorded its rightful esteem. Precisely because of another gift, that of speech, both of internal speech and external speech. That is, the ability to live within our heads as well as transmit to others what may be occurring inside us. Too often, the gift of silence suffers from a want of attention due to the presence of this shinier bit of language.

Language, for all its social, political, and even individual merits, stands ready to block us from what otherwise silence readily offers.

Silence, first of all, offers us an appearance of intelligence and wisdom. As the Proverbialist says, “Even fools are thought wise if they keep silent, and discerning if they hold their tongues.” Mere appearance it may be, but not a few of us would benefit from this appearance, for as visual creatures that we are, appearance is the first invitation to anything else. As some witty man also said, “Only shallow people do not judge by appearances.”

While it is most preferred for one to both appear wise and be wise, or, for an alternative, to not appear wise but be wise (esse quam videri), it is still preferable to appear wise and be a fool than to appear and be foolish. If the former, that is, to appear but not be wise, one may still draw sympathy from people. They may assume that you are foolish by some involuntary fortune: maybe by parental neglect, or just age, or just any other factor outside your control. They may refrain from or delay calling you foolish. They may even use other appellations such as “untrained,” “amateur,” “novice,” and “still needing formation.” But at least, no one would avoid you, calling you a scoffer. This benefit, at least, silence offers.

However, there are better benefits of silence. Like inner serenity and wholeness. In other words, apart from saving your image before others, silence saves your psyche from yourself. For it is the particular sweet peril of speech that, because it belongs to the political community, it has something in it that exceeds your small self. Language, by reason of use, brings one into a tradition filled with dense symbols, symbols which themselves have mostly undisclosed ancestry. When then the speaker steps into this sea of mental symbols unprepared; that is, without having a good handle on his particular psychological state, he is swept into the current and drowned under the bilious waves of this opaque ancestry tightly attached to the language. What is a good —that is the language itself— then shreds the unprepared entity into psychological fragments and spreads the pieces of his vessel ashore.

An instance may be seen in a situation when some man enters into a debate with others. Say on the nature of politics; and having not known either his particular temperament and disposition or the subject, he is carried away into affirming or denying something crucial which he would never have done. Now, philosophy may either begin with wonder or with the knowledge of oneself; of which the oracle says, “Man, know thyself.” And when wonder means an amiable ignorance, it is perilous that a man be ignorant of himself totally, as to be lost and swept away by the political frenzy which language induces. As such, not knowing one’s own disposition to enjoy much freedom, one affirms that all authority must be destroyed in order to remove authoritarianism.

A man may be pardoned on the notion of not understanding the distinction between authority and authoritarianism. But his back must not be spared blows if —and especially because— he is unaware of the need for authority as a prerequisite of freedom. This man must be scourged and his feet placed in stocks for the reason that he has never paid attention to the recipes of his favourite meal. That is to say that while he lacks the knowledge of the distinction between authority and authoritarianism, he should not lack the wits to distinguish between freedom —which he enjoys— from anarchy (which he definitely wouldn’t). Such a man does not even know himself. A man who cannot distinguish between his favourite meal and its rotten counterpart should be ready to eat anything.

But silence allows a man to know himself. To discriminate. To collect himself together and make choices for his own benefit. This also, silence offers. However, silence’s best offer is nothing other than experience with existence itself; experience with being and the fountain of life.

There is something about thought that, for all its actual purpose of providing the means by which we hold to real things, it may also be the same thing that blocks the light of being from reaching the darkness in our souls. For inasmuch as silence is crucial for collecting oneself together, it is only a preparation for the sake of sailing out from within ourselves to sate the wonder that innately exists in us.

We want to know. And knowledge brings us such delight, apart from use. We love to see, even if we do nothing with it. We want to make contact with, and be embraced by, reality as such. Something in us yearns for something not in us. We want to search for the deep things of the universe and come to speak its language. In short, it is not communication we want, but communion; the belonging together in the most intimate way possible with the things that are not us. We want not just to speak, but we want to be understood. Yet, mere understanding is not enough; nay, understanding is itself a way of possession —possessing the other and the other possessing us. We want to own and be owned in a deep embrace. And knowledge is the means by which we do this. We want to enter a communion so deep such that verbal communication wilts away in the light of something superior. We want to be one with that which is not ourselves and eliminate every gap and chasm. This is what we most want. And also why we employ language.

But language, that shinier gift than silence, sometimes steals our focus. Because it shines, we see our reflection in it. We speak, and we are impressed with our speaking. We think, and congratulate ourselves for thought. People understand us, and we applaud the understanding. We are then, sadly, ferried away by something that is not what we want. Then, the vehicle which ought to ferry us as far as it can —for communication is subservient to communion—becomes our prison. We are stuck in a house of mirrors, mirrors of our own making. We have a thousand copies and reflections of ourselves reading speeches and constructing beautiful architectures of ideas. We are shut in; we possess nothing and are possessed by nothing. Our deepest desires thwarted. We create an abyss of linguistic crystals; they reflect us and nothing more. We stare at it, and it, for sure, in a thousand places, stares back. But silence offers more and better.

The point of language is silence. The end of language is silence. Language seeks termination. Thought seeks fruition. Desire seeks fulfilment. And this is clearly seen in the world of everyday things: of food, sleep, and sex, our foremost appetites, we want food, sleep, and sex, not lectures about food, sleep, and sex. We want to experience these things rather than the endless reams of discussion about them. We want to enjoy these things rather than tales about them.

Those who lecture us on mouth-watering recipes torture us. Those who titillate and tease us punish us. Those who blare loud noises into our ears to keep us from sleeping while they tell us of the benefits of 8-hour sleep are Satan’s spawns themselves. If we can bypass the lectures to the things themselves, we would. The point of the thing is the thing. However, if it is the case that we cannot arrive at the thing without the lecture, we may attend the lecture, so long as it takes us to the thing.

We may describe red all day to a friend. The hope is to bring him into a vision of red, however faint. And we may quickly learn our limits when we meet a man born blind. We quickly realise that language, for all its wealth, is poor. It pales beside the thing it wishes to convey.

Much more than those bodily appetites mentioned, our rational soul yearns for its own experience. It yearns to possess and be possessed. It wants the thing and not the cardboard copy of the thing. It wants the reality and not the phantasm. But for the nature of the rational soul, being intellectual, it must proceed via language and thought. Notwithstanding, it wants the thing. It wants to rest, harbour, and terminate its ascent in its true object. And when it does, it rests in silence. Until then, the struggle continues. The struggle represented in vigorous thinking and speaking.

When the soul terminates at its true harbour —in Jesus Christ, the one God and Lord—its struggle ceases. And at once, we see that language is an ameliorative gift, given for our insufficiency. It is a ferry carrying one across water.

Yet, even while it seeks its total and final anchoring at its harbour, the soul finds occasional and short-lived rest in temporary harbours. Every time we come to know some truth, some actual wisdom, some part of the whole reality, our soul harbours temporarily and sighs for a while. And we must learn to rest well in silence. One must disembark the linguistic ferry and go into the town to experience the things there.

It is useless to harbour and remain on the ship until it is time to sail again. This is to say that when, through great philosophical labour, you earn a slice of wisdom, you must enjoy her, like cheese. And this is why it is good that poets have been awkwardly silent about the subject of cheese.

For wisdom is like cheese. It is best had in pieces. And with great reverence and attention. For it is reckless to think vigorously about cheese while eating it. You cannot do both at the same time. You cannot, in the same moment, enjoy the taste of cheese while deeply philosophising about it. If cheese is to be enjoyed, the poet must learn to be an eater and not a poet at the moment. You cannot also enjoy a warm embrace truly while also vigorously thinking about warm embraces. Absent-mindedness is so called for a reason; if your mind is flying somewhere else, it cannot at the same time be present. You cannot genuinely laugh while vigorously philosophising about humour. The proper enjoyment of that which we want is gained in silence. This is what silence offers us best.

Of course, we understand this, which is why the idiom has gone forth: empty barrels make the loudest noise.

May we abhor the temptation of the thousand linguistic mirrors, avoiding those false crystals. May we journey out of ourselves into the harbours of ourselves. And while there, let us enjoy what we will come to possess without noise. Let’s receive the gift of silence.

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“And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth.”

—Lady Galadriel

For a lively break from my treatment on the more sombre subject of abortion and the malice of wicked euphemisers against embryos with severe anomalies detected in utero, allow me to reflect on a less sombre and more colourful subject. On the subject of whether husbands are glorified errand boys. A sentiment I picked up while listening to a gentleman in an interview who was asked to share his experience as a new father and the challenges he faced.

This interview has racked up its fair tax of controversy in months past; and is no concern of mine, really. (In fact, you will find at the end of this essay that the sentiment itself is only fodder for some other agenda.) What concerns us here is that the man, sharing his experience, said that husbands are nothing but glorified errand boys. And overlooked errand boys at that, as most of the attention is focused on the postpartum mother.

A statement which earned its commentary —in the common frame of everything published on the internet. A vast portion of people thought he shouldn’t have expressed it this way. After all, his wife, who had just given birth to their child, needed him.

I take a slightly different view. But before relaying it, I ought to say that for a fair share of my young life, I have been far too exposed to the pessimism of husbands and fathers. Not very many of them exude the dignity I am certain is bound in the status of “father.” To be a husband and father, to too many men than I can count, consists in some sort of emasculation, one in which they seem to take pride. For it is overrepresented in voices loud enough, men who are willing to be carried along the tide, named “happy wife, happy life.” Men for whom and in whom leading their families is the human analogue of a reluctant ox plowing a field joylessly.

To be sure, the reader must not hear me say that these men are not good husbands and fathers in the sense of fulfilling their duties faithfully, albeit quietly. I am not requesting a boisterous declaration either. Rather, I am asserting that they might be doing so —fulfilling their duties— faithfully and quietly while portraying it bleakly. As a drab and undignified necessity. For I have learned to flee the scenes where a man begins to say “happy wife, happy life” or “just do what she says.” Regardless of how long they have stayed in the marriage. This drab pessimism, I suppose, is where I might file this same sentiment of the husband being a glorified errand boy.

I surmise that the type of mind and age that produces sentiments as this must be a mind and time incapable of the poetic, staunchly prosaic, and almost irredeemably mechanistic. I surmise also that things have not always been this way: we have not always been this prosaic and mechanistic and less poetic as a species, and this is the recipe we have lost.

When I hear, for instance, of the creed of medieval quarrymen, who, cutting mere stones, envisioned cathedrals, or the builders of Gothic cathedrals with their savage and obstinate love of nature poetically printed on stones as John Ruskin details, or the sea-shanties of sailors, I am all the more convinced that some thing was lost. And its absence has made our time harsher to cope with, despite all the seeming progress of which we boast.

This thing is the poetic mind. And also the land of spirits. And the perilous realm of fairies. And the warm presence of God. For having assumed that the world is nothing but a well-ordered machine, we have driven away all forms of true poetic entities; we are left with dead matter and a mind of wheels and metals. That’s why we can say that the husband is a glorified errand boy.

Too many times, we are quick to think that when the events of life have an unpleasant edge, the best action is to remove the unpleasant edge. But we are slow to think, and this is our real error, that maybe it is not a matter of what is present, but a matter of what is not present. By this I mean that it is the actual situation, a good deal of the time, that it is not that motherhood is hard, or that fatherhood is thankless, or that being the first kid is too harsh a task. Or, in this case, being a husband is servile. But those things which make perseverance possible, which cushion, lubricate, or dignify, are missing from the mental ensemble. Maybe, just maybe, it is not that being a quarryman is hard, breaking stones, but that the quarryman has lost the eye that sees the Cathedral. As such, it is not my intent to say that the task of husband and father to a vulnerable postpartum wife and mother is not arduous and taxing. But that the dignity of the patriarch is amiss.

The seat of husband and father, as I have come to learn, is the seat of principle; that is, that from which things proceed. It is the imitation of deity, as St. Thomas says, after God, it is one’s parents. For even Christ, God Himself, says, no one should sin against his parents, committing Corban, by using God as His excuse. It is a hefty seat weighted with dignity; dignified enough to pump a man with thumos enough to shoulder boulders for his wife and offspring. How then do we reduce such an exalted estate to nothing but errandry? I know how: by losing what it means to be and retaining what it means to do; retaining agere but neglecting esse. Whereas, agere sequitur esse (“to do” follows “to be”).

When one is preoccupied with and swallowed up by doing, left with no leisure or Sabbath to contemplate being and ‘mere’ existence, being is lost. And the buoyancy which being gives to the soul in the form of rational light. When the vision of the patriarch’s dignity is lost to a world that has nothing but fangs and daggers for the term ‘patriarchy,’ it offers no surprise to see that a man, father, and husband waits for applause like a Golden Retriever. (I am not surprised as well that there are women who pray to God for their own “Golden Retrievers.”) Such a man is a victim of an anarchical iconoclasm which shatters the noble image of what it means to be a principle and archon, and to have left him with the blurry fog of the managerial “servant-leader” in its place. When a man says being a husband is nothing but being a glorified errand boy, one would be tempted to think he wants gratitude. I dispute: he is starved for nobility. He is not looking to be honoured; his manly heart is hungry to be honourable. He doesn’t just want to be valourised, he wants to be a man of valour.

The stage was well set for this catastrophe. We exiled the enchantment in things and mechanised the human spirit. We gave ourselves to training for occupation and forgot to be men as men. We built the machines and then tried to make ourselves in their image; so we locked ourselves into their way of being and allowed for no surreal events; events that interrupt the normal way of things. We banished the Hobgoblins and set ourselves enemies to unusual surprises.

Somewhere at the back of my mind, I can hear that common cynical song rebuking my boyish idealism. It goes like this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.” (Taken directly from Chesterton). I reply that “I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics. I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the General Election.” (Directly from Chesterton still.) With Chesterton I stand.

I am still as idyllic as I was. No. More idyllic than I was. My idyllism grows with my potential wrinkles and greys. Which is why I am eager to set forth the capsule I think is good for all men to swallow. We must do fairy tales again. We ought to see boys grow on a staple of adventure and chivalrous tales. In doing so, we will set forth a new image for them to behold and be formed after. So that when they set out on errands for their wife and the mother of their child, they are consumed with the nobility of their being as it is transmitted in the valour of their task. Rather than be an errand boy, he desires errantry. Rather than go out to buy baby food, he wants to win his lady’s honour. In other words, the boy wants a richer mind and a noble heart.

Our current day revolts against images. Especially the image of God. It hates the symbols which pay no homage to the machine. It destroys the image of God as printed on the male and female bodies. It despises the image of God’s kingship emblazoned on human kings; it despises the image of Christ, the Redeeming Husband, by demeaning human husbands and trashes the church by fueling reviling wives.

But what boys and men need is the image of Christ, the saviour husband. For when next the man has to go bear up under harsh conditions to see that his wife’s needs are met, he ought to see himself participating in the Christly paradigm of laying down his life for her, picking it back up, ascending into heavenly places, and riding once more in a triumphal procession. Valete

A meme, let us pray:

Supporting Argument: It would seem that those who oppose aborting embryos with severe anomalies but who neither suffer nor care for those who suffer disabilities are being egotistic and assert a luxury belief. For the reason that without any experience of what it is like to suffer from such things, these people lack the intimate sense that informs true moral and medical thinking. Whatever they produce, because it is far from where the suffering is happening, is nothing other than rank casuistry. As Flannery O’Connor says, “Conviction without experience makes for harshness.”

What happens is that they place moral ideals over real people, sticking with rigid absolutes and condemning those people who suffer disabilities and their caregivers to suffering in the Procrustean bed of moral righteousness. They refuse pragmatism, and, unwittingly, imitate the postures of Pharisees in the Bible who, not valuing life and survival, condemn those who pick an ear of corn and object to the healing of those bound by infirmities. Although not an exact parallel, those who oppose this special abortion share one common trait: the decision to stick to the letter of the law even at the cost of keeping people in suffering. Even the Bible says God desires mercy, not sacrifice. Mercy is relieving people of their suffering —both of the embryo with severe anomalies and their would-be caregivers.

We must not hold on to suffering children for the sake of moral superiority. We should relieve their potential suffering. To do otherwise is cruel.

On The Contrary: When asked whose sin —his or his parents—caused a man to be born blind, Jesus replied that “Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.”

Also, we should defend the cause of the weak and vulnerable. And the baby in the womb is the most vulnerable among us.

I Answer That: It is an ancillary consideration of what their inner states or motives are if they are proclaiming the truth. As such, the first question that must be considered is whether it is good or medically responsible to abort an embryo which has had severe anomalies detected in it. We have treated this question in the first and second articles, and we know that it is neither good nor medically responsible. We also know that it is not good to destroy an entity as a means to remove their suffering. What comes after this is of little relevance to the hearer/reader and more of a problem for the proclaimer. It is irrelevant for the reader in that if it is true, he should pick the truth and move on, not minding the speaker’s motive. If it is false, he can dismiss it and move on, not minding the speaker’s motive. We should let the speaker account for his own psychological state. If he has spoken true propositions from egotism, his intellect works well but his will is twisted —this is for his soul to resolve. One must resist the temptation to bulverise.

Now, on the charge of luxury belief, no true absolute proposition of the kind under consideration is a luxury belief. If it is true, it holds for everyone regardless of their economic status. Notwithstanding the true circumstance that obeying moral laws comes at varying costs depending on your social class. However, if you hold that all men are equal in substance, then it follows that moral laws of this kind bind all. Now we are dealing here with a fundamental moral law that “thou shalt not murder.” This is binding on all men, insofar as they are individuals of a rational nature. And abortion is murder. Therefore, the law to not murder is binding on all individuals of a rational nature.

Reply To Supporting Argument: We must disabuse ourselves of the relatable sentiment that suffering confers wise judgment. For if it were so, all suffering would produce wisdom in all who suffer, necessarily. Which we know, self-evidently, is not so.

Surely, such circumstances provide a situation where one may acquire some wisdom. But it does not follow that all who suffer become wise or have their judgment improved by their suffering. Rather, it depends on the nature of the sufferer whether they will become wiser having suffered. In truth, it becomes more the case that most when we suffer, we tend to suffer lapses in judgement due to the agony caused by the suffering. And in situations such as this, a clear-eyed observer is of great benefit.

Now wisdom is prior to us all in existence. We may come and pass in existence, but wisdom remains. Wisdom is the permanent feature of the world, and the architect of all that exists. Which means that wisdom —and the correct answer for every situation—is prior to the situation itself. And if the correct answer to a situation is prior to it, even though sometimes unknown to us prior to the situation itself, it means that one does not need to suffer to apprehend the correct response to a situation —even though the answer might require some tempering through experience. For if it were the case that a person must suffer every possible type of suffering to be called wise, we are all doomed to folly since we cannot suffer every possible type of suffering. In truth, people are called wise because they have a certain breadth and depth of good judgment not confined to their experiences only. “It belongs to a wise man, St. Thomas says, “primarily to meditate on the first principles and speak of it to others, and to refute contrary falsehood.”

With that said, mercy does not involve destroying the subject completely, as we have said in question one. Mercy is not a free call to further transgression. It is immoral to destroy a life solely for its medical defects. Those who would call this mercy are cruel and have mastered the art of wearing euphemisms.

Now the problem is still afoot of what to do with these people who will have a hard life. Ordinarily, a single caregiver cannot bear the burden they bring. As such, it falls on the collective to look after their welfare. Which means that the presence of those who suffer among us reminds us that the burden of caring for the sick is a burden of the collective. This is especially important as we drift towards that insidious thing called individualism. Insofar as the burdens we have to bear keep us formed in our rational nature, then it is good —not good per se, but good towards an end greater than itself.

We must reject all ersatz compassion, which ultimately leads to moral deformation and stick to the wise judgment which is good for our souls.

Read Questions One, Two, and Three below:

Argument For: It would seem as if knowingly carrying a pregnancy to term when severe anomalies have been detected in utero that would make the child’s life unbearably difficult is rooted in conservatism. For conservatism is just an excuse to perpetuate hate, and hate grounds the decision to let an embryo with several anomalies detected be born into the world to suffer all that could have been prevented, and as well to cause its caregivers to suffer.

Furthermore, those who hold that they may not abort an embryo with severe anomalies detected in utero simply follow archaic traditions, customs and conventions, not out of reasoning and thorough information —as in consulting experts— but from prejudice and blind adherence to the insistence of social traditions. This is especially true of conservatism because conservatism eschews rational thought. In fact, for the conservative, rational thought is evil. Nothing can be worse for the conservative than rational thought, because people who think rationally might decide to evolve, use their minds and free will, and make choices that the conservative doesn’t agree with. What H.L. Mencken says of Puritanism is especially true of conservatism: which is that it is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

And this is because at the core of conservatism is none other than authoritarianism. Conservatives have no care for individual liberty, but only wish to promulgate hierarchies, inequalities, and oppressive norms; especially for the few who benefit from such hierarchies, inequalities, and norms. All while not caring for those who are trampled under by those elements of an unequal society.

Marked by nostalgia for traditional cultural beliefs, conservatives spend more time worrying about political correctness and intersectionality to see the real, material problems in society. All this is because, per its name, “conservatism,” its goal is to resist change, stop humans and society from evolving, and maintain the status quo against true progress. For we know that societal evolution is always present where rationality and science have been allowed to prevail. Even when they are resisted by conservatives, they prevail anyway, even if with much struggle. And if there be any resistance to the wonders of new technology, which allow us to detect severe anomalies of embryos in utero, and the concomitant preventive measures, it is rooted in conservatism.

On the contrary: Russell Kirk says, “The conservative is concerned, first of all, for the regeneration of the spirit and character —with the perennial problem of the inner order of the soul, the restoration of the ethical understanding, and the religious sanction upon which any life worth living is founded. This is conservatism at its highest.”

I Answer That: We must know right from the start that Conservatism as a conscious political doctrine, distinct from the conservative temperament, is about the same age as liberalism; in fact, one might say that they were born of the same womb, although vastly different in character, like Esau and Jacob —one a wild man of the field, the other a tame shepherd who dwells in tents.

Set against the principles of the French Revolution, conservatism, as most associated with Edmund Burke, is not opposed to liberty. What it opposes is a liberty “stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of metaphysical abstraction.” For such is ideology, and conservatism is the negation of ideology, as Stuart Hughes urges. For ideology is founded merely upon “ideas” —upon fancies, for the most part unrelated to personal and social reality; while conservative views are founded upon custom, convention, and the long experience of the human species.

This last point may be otherwise stated in Oakeshottian terms that “To be conservative is to be disposed to think and behave in certain manners; it is to prefer certain kinds of conduct and certain conditions of human circumstances to others; it is to be disposed to make certain kinds of choices.”

Which is not to mean that it is mere and bare prejudice for the familiar. Nay, it is giving priority to the perennial, especially that which perennially flows from human nature. As Scruton says, “Conservatism is not in the business of correcting human nature or shaping it according to some conception of the ideal rational chooser. It attempts to understand how societies work, and to make the space required for them to work successfully. Its starting point is the deep psychology of the human person.”

Where both are gestated in the same sac, liberalism and conservatism remain at war over the question of which comes first: liberty or order. For both hold human liberty as a political good, but in which order makes all the difference. For the conservative, order is man’s first need of all. As Russell Kirk says, “The human condition is insufferable unless we perceive a harmony, an order, in existence.” This is evinced in famous myths in the world; notably the Bible and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which begin their account with the notion of chaos and the setting forth of order.

Whether social order or one’s inner order, man is thrown into disarray without a sense of order. If so driven, man is forced to accept disorder as a kind of order just to ‘make sense’ of things that he might then be able to set forth his other administrations. It is the soul’s need for order which is powerfully expressed in the yearning for both an individual and tribal or national identity. For if we don’t know who we are, we are vulnerable to the windy impositions of those who always want to tell us who we are.

The conservative recognises this and insists on it, even against the petulance of the liberalist who insists that liberty is the first and ultimate good, and that order proceeds from liberty. The conservative will be sure to insist that liberty inheres in some subject, and it is that subject that must be preserved if we will preserve liberty. So, whether it is the individual soul or the social order, the conservative insists on their preservation as the precursor to the preservation of every consequent goods. Conservatism, both as a temperament and conscious political doctrine, we might say, is the signals towards and is concerned with the permanent things.

Reply To The Argument: A conservative simply believes in a transcendent, enduring moral order; believes that order is made for man, and man is made for it: human nature is a constant, and moral truths are permanent. Which prescribes, as has been presented in the previous questions answered, that the embryo in the womb is of the human race and deserves to be preserved, as our way of demonstrating fidelity to this permanent moral order. And this embryo with severe anomalies, insofar as it exists truly, has something divine in it.

Conservatives do not eschew rational thought, as they depend on it to apprehend this moral order. This is obvious to those who can distinguish between the ratio and the mechanistic rationalism of the current day, which marks the epistemology of progressivism. As Sir Roger Scruton says, “conservatism is both systematic and reasonable, and its political expression follows persuasively from natural beliefs that are the common property of every social being.”

Of freedom too, the conservative acknowledges that true freedom is the freedom to live virtuously, will succeeding intellect and not vice versa. As such, conservatism eschews the “volitional expanse” afforded by the technological cult of death.

Therefore, it would seem then that the refusal to abort an embryo is rooted in conservatism. But I say that it is rooted in good sense. And it is rooted in conservatism insofar as conservatism represents both the temperament and the politics of good sense.

Read Question 1 and

Question 2 As you wait for the next question: Whether those who oppose such abortions, but who neither are disabled nor invalid, nor are they caregivers to those who are, are simply being egotistic or asserting a luxury belief

Argument For: It seems so that aborting a child with severe anomalies detected in utero is an informed, professional decision, one that spares both the child and the parents immense suffering. For the reason that it maximises both life and volition simultaneously. An opportunity to maximise both things —life and volition—is a general good, and in this case, a particular good allowed by technological advances.

These technological advancements, which enable the expansion of decision-making and alleviate suffering, can be viewed as “common grace”, — as Christians call it. Where common grace includes all the beneficences of the creator, which all creatures share as commons and not gifts restricted to Christians alone. Common grace includes all the innovations which help to reduce suffering. But this is by the way.

We should consider that with the advancements recorded in IVF and genome screening, we can give parents the power to protect their children before pregnancy begins. Rather than surrendering to nature's cruel decree, especially in its lottery-like allocation of such debilitating illnesses and disabilities, we can take control of destinies and prevent a harsh life of suffering for both parents and children, even before it starts. This is especially noteworthy. That we can have a better handle on this genetic lottery, which we are subject to, where people win and others lose, through no fault of their own.

This ability to control our fate, it should be said, proves the dignity of man. Rather than being sock puppets of biological factors, we can have some ‘volitional expanse,’ increasing our scope of choices as active agents, rather than hapless patients. The ability to make informed decisions, that is, decisions from calculated reasoning, rather than merely succumbing to ‘fate’ and sentiments like brutes, is core to what we call morality. Without the faculty of choice and the quality of agency, praise, blame, reward, and responsibility are all meaningless terms. We ought to take the chances we have been given to extend the use of our volitional faculties.

Therefore, against those who would rather have us submit witlessly to nature’s brutality and shrink the use of our volitional faculty despite the chance to increase it, because of sentimental notions and concepts such as “the fear of losing something important when we sever the link between sex and procreation,” or “letting nature take its course,” we affirm that aborting a child with severe anomalies detected in utero is an informed, professional decision, one that spares both the child and the parents immense suffering.

On The Contrary: Aborting the child to spare both the child and the parents immense suffering is a reflective barbarism. Alexander Bertland says of the barbarism of reflection that it “is a returned barbarism in which the common sense established by religion through poetic wisdom holding a society together has been broken down by individual interests. The interests are spurred because individuals each think according to their own conceptual scheme without concern for the society, which makes it barbaric.”

Vico himself says that “such peoples [in the barbarism], like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure (The New Science 1106).”

Even worse, it violates the line of the Hippocratic oath, which swears that “I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion.”

I Answer That: the conference and deliberation of ubiquitous white coats, transparent test tubes, and the endless whirring and humming machines which rival heaven’s sophistications do not amount to an informed, professional decision if the conclusion reached involves killing an innocent being.

Some writers have written and drawn the parallel between the ancient practice of ‘exposing’ unwanted infants to the harshness of nature as a way of eliminating them, often for the sake of preventing suffering for both the parent and the child, and the modern-day medical practice of aborting unwanted infants, such as those in which severe defects and anomalies have been detected. The difference however, is that we recognise one as crude, and condemn it, whereas the latter seems more “reasoned,” and embellished with euphemisms to seduce weak ears and minds lacking moral imagination. Abortion is infanticide anyhow.

It is not an informed, professional decision when it violates a basic principle of the Hippocratic oath that “I will give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked, nor suggest any such counsel; and in like manner I will not give to a woman a pessary to produce abortion.” It is barbarism all the way down, but barbarism of reflection and a vanity of the learned. Barbarism, which has mastered the disguise of educated compassion for the unborn and the parent, nonetheless violates the starting principle of preserving life, for life is that from which everything else proceeds.

Furthermore, we must examine the art of medicine, which is the art of ordering the body back to health using available remedies. Those who practice this art ought to remain loyal to restoring the body to health and should have no interest in destroying it. Although we acknowledge that it is sometimes necessary to destroy parts of the body to bring health to the whole or save a life, it is out of the scope of the medicinal arts to destroy the entire body as a means of healing it —which is no healing at all. As such, those who advocate destroying the subject as a remedy to suffering are not making any informed professional decision, as they have stepped out of their scope as healers to become licensed executioners.

Reply To The Argument For: Against the worship of choice and agency as the ultimate good, I answer that free choice is and ought to be ordered towards what is good. Volition in and of itself is nothing, if not ordered towards desiring what is good. In fact, the will wants what is good. The object of the volition is good, not volition itself. As such, they err who praise ‘volitional expanse’ at any cost.

Technology is only good insofar as it is ordered towards what is good. And if technological advancement only helps us execute evil more conveniently, it is no good. In fact, in that sense, it is not neutral.

This should not be taken to mean opposition to all technology. No, we welcome, and ought to welcome, all technological means which help us perform our moral duties. We will also welcome all means which help the sick and suffering to bear under such, or which conform to the art of medicine, that is, the healing arts. What we shall not pretend to praise are contrivances which have as their remedy the destruction of innocent lives because it is convenient.

Contrary to the argument, life is about maximising good, which is most clearly seen in striving for moral perfection, rather than bodily comfort. For man is a rational animal, constituted of body and soul, where the soul is the immaterial part which reaches out for and apprehends the immaterial dimension of life. In this immaterial realm is where we find the moral component of the universe, which includes notions such as justice, fairness, right, truth, and the things which are proper to human dignity and set us apart and above the brutes. Therefore, life is about maximising all these in true and unified proportions, rather than the mere exercise of will for exercise sake.

The will or volition is an appetitive faculty which aspires to these aforementioned goods. Where bodily good is also to be desired, perfection of soul is to be preferred, and the will should be trained to swim in the direction of what is good. In this regard, it is honourable to suffer if the alternative is a grave moral error, such as the destruction of life. This is true, and must be said with all soberness and not flippancy: suffering must not be glorified for its own sake, as we admit that it is a form of privation.

A debilitating illness an embryo might have, which will cause immense suffering for it and its parents, is evil, although physical evil. While murdering the child in utero is also evil, notably, spiritual evil, and spiritual evils —that is, of the type proceeding from the will—is worse than physical evil. If genetic allotments of such defects feel like cosmic injustice, we can grant this ‘feeling’ (as a matter of compassion) while yet acknowledging that the remedy for physical injustices is not spiritual ones. The latter is graver than the former, and should not be an option for us.

So, no, aborting the child is not an informed, professional decision, one that spares both the child and the parents immense suffering. It is a decision which twists the soul and reduces us to worse than brutes, since what brutes may do by instinct, we do with careful reflection. There is no excuse.

Next, I will be answering the question “Whether the refusal to abort the embryo and end unnecessary suffering is rooted in conservatism.”

Read Question 1 here: Whether It Is Responsible To Knowingly Carry A Pregnancy To Term When Severe Anomalies Have Been Detected In Utero That Would Make The Child’s Life Unbearably Difficult.

Objection: It would seem as if it is irresponsible to carry a pregnancy to term if severe anomalies have been detected in utero because caring for healthy children is expensive, let alone one who would be plagued with a disability all the days of his life. Seeing all that parents endure in caring for a healthy child for what is relatively a brief period of life, a disabled child will, on the other hand, perpetually need care, even sometimes for their lifetime. One must consider the cost and inconvenience. We must consider that it is both expensive and inefficient.

Furthermore, the child itself will be subject to pain and discomfort all the days of its life. Every time you have to run to the emergency room, seeing the child in pain, you will be reminded that you could have prevented this suffering by terminating the embryo in utero. Worse still, one of the two parents might be needed to sacrifice their lives to care for the child. And heaven forbid anything happens to one parent, leaving just one left to care for it.

Added to that, depending on what baby number the disabled child is, it will change the family’s dynamic and the lives of its members. For if it is the first child born to its parents, the inconvenience so exerted might mean the end of childbearing for its parents. As the cost of caregiving takes its physical, financial, and psychological toll on the family. If it is the second, third, or so child born to the parents, the child will require more attention than its other siblings. And even those siblings will be required to serve the needs of their disabled sibling. This might result in resentment, since these siblings will be tasked with sacrificing a normal mode of life for the sake of their disabled sibling —even if for a while.

So, yes, it would seem as if it is irresponsible to knowingly carry a pregnancy to term when severe anomalies have been detected in utero that would make the child’s life unbearably difficult.

On The Contrary: It is most responsible to preserve, rather than destroy, a life. For it is the most responsible thing in the world to preserve that which grounds every other thing, and life is that which grounds all other things. As such, ancient wisdom says that where there is life, there is hope.

I reply that: What is irresponsible is falling prey to euphemisms which hide the most hideous actions, such as killing a baby in the womb. As Chesterton the Chad says, “evil always takes advantage of ambiguity.” We must face, with a humiliating transparency, what the alternative of “carrying a pregnancy to term when severe anomalies have been detected in utero that would make the child’s life unbearably difficult” is. Which is that such a child must be terminated. In the clearest terms, this is murder.

Between murder and an unbearably difficult life, common sense —not to be confused with a barbarism of reflection (to be treated later)—tells us that the former is, not only irresponsible, but evil. Where evil is the privation of good, and life is good, essentially. For life is the ground for all other things, including suffering.

Now this must not be taken to mean that we who oppose this euphemistic call to murder glorify suffering or take some relish in having people suffer unbearable things that we who oppose this type of murder do not suffer from. It does not mean that we sacrifice real, concrete human beings on the altar of abstract principles. On the contrary, it is because we realise that life concretely is the expression of life abstractly, that we oppose such barbarism.

Surely we oppose suffering, especially of the debilitating kind. But this opposition to these types of suffering may only go so far as to seek reparative remedies or amelioration of the pain. But the very principle which is life may not be contravened in an effort to remove suffering.

If life is itself the ground of suffering, it follows that a genuine affirmation of life demands an acceptance of the reality of a suffering which cannot be removed without destroying life itself. Life, we must acknowledge, is not a buffet or a shelf of goods where we might so select conveniences only. No, the acceptance of life —because it is given to us and not taken by us—requires that some things will be selected for us prior to our ability to consent to them. Although we may, through the ingenuity that life provides, make more of ourselves with what we have been given, it is particularly irresponsible to destroy this good gift because we don’t like some of the items on its shelf.

On the topic of the cost and toil of caring for the child, as well as its dynamic on family life, one must say with much boldness and with genuine grief and compassion nonetheless that we oppose the underlying assumption that the goal of life is to dodge all suffering. For this is what the charge of irresponsibility ultimately is: without the presupposition that true living consists in ease and evading suffering, the case that it is irresponsible to carry a potentially disabled foetus to term falls flat; the charge will have no basis. Its undisguised basis is that a difficult life is not worth living. This I deny, and affirm instead, that a difficult life is worth living. Otherwise, no life is worth living at all.

P.S: The notion of a “barbarism of reflection” is especially relevant when I consider the next question, “Whether aborting the child is an informed, professional decision, one that spares both the child and the parents immense suffering.”

Yet, something more amusing rules the modern mind: the idea that marrying for love started with Shakespeare, or the romanticists, or the feminists, or somewhere not too far behind. The idea is that for most of human history, marriage was transactional, or for bare survival, and that it was only recently that the human heart started beating for love, and butterflies started to flutter in the belly. Prior to that, the human heart was stone cold, as were marriages, and butterflies were only mythical maggots. This is not only untrue, but simply impossible. We don’t know this, however, because we live in a metaphysically impoverished age.

As an aside, there is something thrilling about disillusionment. That is, the ability to unveil and disenchant enchanted things; to remove the magic from the appearance or substance of things. Sir Roger Scruton describes the appeal as, “We watch with fascination as our ideals are punctured, and our gods brought down to earth.” Which is the particular ailment of the mind which looks upon the norms and traditions of the past with the adolescence of the present and casts judgement of that immature sort which pubescent teenagers inflict on their parents.

The thought that “Across cultures, marriage hasn’t always been about love, or even about women’s agency,” is one of those disenchanting tropes that has now been overplayed and rehearsed to a point of insipidity. Why is this? Because we have become avian in our conceptions, amnesic in our observations, and stumped in our judgements. In simpler words, we have become like birds who are distracted by every particular motion, unable to stay and contemplate enduring things (beings), losing all metaphysical vision. We swim in the tasteless soup of historical particulars, failing to see the durable elements of existence, such as love.

When people say things like “In many early societies, it functioned as a transaction that unified warring families and strengthened kingdoms. And in that exchange, the woman (often young and voiceless), was the bridge,” it is because they are locked into the psychology of the day and cannot see beyond its bars. For if they could, they would realise two things: first, that erotic love and desire are so elementary to human life that if all marriages everywhere were transactions —until the present day— the human race would have exploded. For the erotic passions, which have as their aim to congregate the male and female, are like a volatile canister which, if not properly handled, will light the house aflame. How then could this have been so suppressed that it wasn’t until Shakespeare that people knew to marry for love?

This first problem relies on a sample problem, of course: it is always a sample of the elites of society. Who else had the lands and kingdoms to over which to barter their children? What did the poor farmer have that he would give his daughter to secure? The princess was always the prize. It would seem as if nobility and royalty came with responsibilities. Who cares for the cobbler’s daughter, save the young man who truly loved her? Or the other richer gentleman who had nothing to lose? How many of these richer gentlemen existed by the way? Thus, from this sample set, the bulletin has gone flying across the seas that marriage was a cold contract until God sent Shakespeare to preach the gospel of love. If the erotic desire was so suppressed until “the veil of modernity fell over our rituals,” how do you suppose that a race which congregates by that desire, as fuel to machine, survived the years without devolution and implosion? Should we take our sample set from The Bible for starters, considering its age, the theme of the erotic is everywhere —between man and wife: Abraham caressed his wife in semi-public view, Isaac loved Rebekah in an instant, Jacob worked fourteen years for the woman he loved. This is Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, by whom God calls Himself; these men yearned for their women with total abandon. How then do we suppose that everyone was a cold-blooded spouse until recently when “love, equality, and autonomy” stood around Shakespeare like Peter, James, and John?

The second thing we would realise if we were not as distracted as birds in our metaphysical vision is that it is not that we now marry for love, but that we marry now only for love, or might I say in the name of love —setting aside the question whether it is love at all.

It is not that we now marry for love. Which, as I will show, is not a win. But that we now marry in the name of love, a love that has gone mad, in the same respect as virtues going mad, as when Chesterton says that “The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone.” In the same vein, “marrying for love” is not something to be praised, particularly when that love has gone berserk by being isolated from other virtues and wandering alone.

As when the writer says that “From Mesopotamian dowries to Confucian filial piety, marriage was how a woman was transferred from one owner (her parents) to another (her husband). Her name would change, and her purpose would become: serve, bear, endure, and be f***g quiet.” (Emphasis mine.)

What, one ought to ask, is wrong with Confucian filial piety? Or just filial piety? What part of marrying for love intrinsically opposes piety —that is, one’s duty to their efficient causes; duty to parents, tribe, and nation? Is there anything inherent to love which is opposed to the aforementioned duties?

No, comes the response. For without piety, love has no true form and expression, as piety is the spine and lumber of society; “honour thy father and mother, so that your days be long.” For it is piety which says, in the words of Cordelia, Lear’s daughter, “According to my bond; no more nor less.” Without piety, there is no morality. Without morality, all you have is immorality. With immorality, you have degradation and degeneration. With degeneration, we are reduced to brutes. What then is a marriage of love that is removed from filial piety except uber-brutism? If we might stretch it at all, to consider that the unitive and procreative purposes of marriage are joined at the head (not the hip), isn’t marriage in and of itself a type of piety; a duty to the human race? As it stands, at the root of anti-natalism common to modern marriages itself is a stringent impiety. It is a refusal to ‘pay forward’ a good deed done for you, whereas civilisations survive only when each generation ‘pays it forward.’

Which is why this furore about marrying for love leads us back to denigrating the content and objects in fairy tales and folklores. To avoid realising our folly, we must become wise in our own eyes, and discount the wisdom of tradition and our priors. Once disenchantment begins, all wombs of magic and wisdom must be ripped open in a barbarous attempt and treated with a cynicism that is not befitting of rational souls. To retain our uber-brutism, we must refuse everything which has its aim our ennoblement.

However, it is not fairy tales that are the targets, but ideals, of which fairy tales and lore are merely vehicles of these ideals. When the avian cynicism kicks in, we want to watch with fascination as our ideals are punctured, and our gods brought down to earth. But since we can’t get to the ideals and noble forms more directly, we thrust at their harbingers.

In defence of fairy-tales, folklores, and the princesses who were “adorned and waiting, had no right to be the agent of her own fate, but the mere prize of someone else’s conquest,” I say that, in Chesterton’s words, “They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic…Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth.” It is not history that judges metaphysics; metaphysics judges history.

Fairy tales, folklores, and myths are the metaphysical capsules digestible for the common intellect. As the philosopher says, “whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders.” History comes after metaphysics —and by extension, wonder, myth, fairytales and folklores—ontologically and logically, even though not chronologically (in our perception).

All this to say, that the charge against ancient societies, that they bartered children in marriage, absent of love, fails in the metaphysical court, but wins those with avian epistemology. And the other instance of repudiating filial piety and folklore merely reveals our current folly. Perhaps we ought to learn what those princesses knew: that marriage is not only about the individuals within it; the family and tribe also are invested in its outcome, as the success or failure thereof produces a ripple effect that rings through the ages. Perhaps we should realise that what we refer to as “marrying for love” is virtue gone berserk and stark individualism driving hard against customary conscience. And to do anything against conscience is neither right nor safe.

My argument is summarised thus: marrying for love has always been, and will always be, necessary, but not sufficient. Here I stand.

Your meme, about marriage, because, why not?

Make no mistake. Unlike with Beatrice and Benedick, I have no personal relationship with Miss India, whose article inspired my response. I have merely followed her work for two years, and have come to love her work addressing the issues troubling young women. I know no other contemporary writer who gives articulate airs to young women's struggles as she does. As such, I am no stranger to the passion in her recent article in First Things. Which, I suppose, everyone expects, ought to be met with articles that heed the theme and call-to-action that we should “argue from feelings” and speak to young women in a style and manner that they care about.

Unfortunately, like Benedick to Beatrice, despite my sympathy for the young women for whom Miss India writes, I fear I cannot do as is expected. That is, in this case, to argue from feelings or at least avoid the overreliance on argument and intellect. Because I have a different and counter thesis: what we are faced with is the crisis of disordered feelings, and order depends on intellect.

It is superfluous now to discuss how much feelings led us away from what was right. It is boring to belabour it. It is especially grievous and heartbreaking to consider it. How else can we demonstrate how feeling forgot what was right than to look at the modern self, which is nothing but expressive individualism, a self-originating source of valid claims operating by sola affecta. Children are mutilated because they feel; boys feel like they are girls trapped in a male container. Or sometimes because it is their mothers who feel and want to feel hip and caring; as such, they encourage their children to mutilate themselves through gender surgery.

Was it not feeling without reason which endangered unborn babies and has since become a seemingly alternative —if not a staple—to the normal way of life? So long as the gestating mother fears that perhaps gestation would put a speed bump in her career. And this is the ‘serious’ reason. There are still some more fleeting reasons for abortion, like wanting to be a free, independent woman unwilling to be robbed of her 20s, her peak years of partying and having fun.

It was feelings, was it not, that made people unable to speak the truth, let women glamorise divorce, and write magazine columns on how they felt caged and they just wanted to let loose and go explore? We lost all discipline through feelings. Up to the point of “Dying For Sex,” a miniseries inspired by a woman diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer who leaves her family to explore sex. And it was still feelings which made grown men, husbands and fathers, go the way of fulfilling their wish to live as women, abandoning their families while at it. Feelings have forgotten what was right and has done its damage. No more. At least, not in its disordered form.

Because, the opposition is not to feelings per se. But to disordered feelings. And disordered feelings are those removed from the truth of reality and being. It is feelings without reason. Therefore, if the right must recover feelings, it must be reordered feelings. This is their foremost task.

Both Chesterton and Scruton would agree with me on this. Because Chesterton, when asked what was wrong with the world, answered that, “What is wrong with the world is that we do not ask what is right.1” Summarising his preceding description of the

“scheme of medical question and answer; the first great blunder of sociology. It is always called stating the disease before we find the cure. But it is the whole definition and dignity of man that in social matters we must actually find the cure before we find the disease.2”

And this is what is wrong with the world. By failing to establish what is right before anything else, before any other inquiry, we cannot proceed rightly. We would botch most of our attempts even when made in good faith. As such, Chesterton declared that what was wanted was an unpractical man.

Scruton, too, in How To Be A Conservative, states that “Conservatism…attempts to understand how societies work, and to make the space required for them to work successfully.3” Echoing the same sentiments in Chesterton, but in a different form: it is only after we have understood how things work that we may begin ordering our households in a way that makes them work. This is true for feelings as well. As it is true for everything, as Russell Kirk, the father of modern American conservatism, said, “Order is the first need of all.4” Typified, of course, by the Biblical account of creation and Ovid and all creation accounts everywhere.

Conservatism’s first business is establishing order. Without which, feelings only intensify the existing chaos. And it seems to me that what the young women in Miss India's essay feel and truly feel are not just pains of loneliness, but the feeling of confusion in a world disordered, a world they cannot call home, because before a home becomes one, it must first be a house and a house is a structure ordered to shelter human beings. As she says, “Don’t we see that this world offers them no other sanctuary?” Where is a sanctuary is a consecrated space, and consecration is the act of ordering and offering an item to an ideal.

What “young women who just don’t believe anyone will stick around, who are terrified to start families because theirs fell apart” really seek and desire is order; as the author says, “I wanted vows and commitments. I wanted guidance and guardrails. I wasn’t cut out for a world that offered no refuge, no haven or hiding place, and I thought the problem was me. What they truly feel is chaos.”

I do not here wish to tell someone what they ‘truly feel.’ I simply appeal to our common rational nature, which lets us know that we are seeking happiness; and happiness is obtained when an appetite is fulfilled by the object it is rightly ordered towards. As such, Sir Roger wrote,

“To teach virtue we must educate the emotions, and this means learning ‘what to feel’ in the various circumstances that prompt them. The virtuous person, in Aristotle’s understanding, does not merely know what to do and what to feel: his life and actions are imbued with the kind of success which is the reward of rational beings, and which Aristotle described as eudaimonia, a term normally translated as happiness or fulfilment5.”

I can tell, as any keen observer can, that we are far from knowing what to feel.

Order is also therapy’s promise. Therapy is not only a vent for feelings. Rather, the ideal allure therapy provides is the promise of ordering one’s emotions and psychology towards moral and psychological recovery. We see this in the now-epidemic “therapy-speak,” which furnishes its adherents with language to articulate psychological problems; although most often without true transformation. The need for order, before anything else, is the first need.

If this is true, it means that the ‘overreliance’ on intellect and argument is befitting. For it is the intellect’s proper duty to apprehend the truth of being and communicate all the consequent faculties towards the truth and good of being. As such, it will be, no matter how well-intentioned, erroneous to “argue from feelings.” For it is not in the capacity of feelings to apprehend good and truth prior to or apart from the intellect. Before we appeal to pathos, we must first secure the logos. For “in the beginning, there was the logos.6”

I suppose this process of establishing what is right and recovering order may not seem as warm or sensitive to the plight of hurting women. As she says, “young women don’t care about that.” But I say that if indeed it is what is needed rather than what is merely wanted, then we must welcome the process with the minimal warmth it offers; just as we do with unpleasant medicines. If the art of medicine is anything to draw from, the worse the ailment, the less savoury the remedy. However, we endure it just until health is restored. Sometimes we are too sick to even know or want what we ought to want.

Even within religion—by this I mean Christianity, the true religion, right doctrine (orthodoxy) precedes right practice (liturgy/orthopraxy). Both precede right feeling (orthopathy). Right doctrine orders and directs our emotions, while liturgy (formality) heightens and focuses them.

Whereas wrong doctrine —powered by feelings— produces wrong practice and both exacerbate wrong feelings; just as Priestesses and female ‘bishops’ have tried all to make different things out of Christ; especially a Christ who never wields the whip. Who affirms sinners in their sin. The ‘Jesus’ who blesses and approves same-sex ‘unions’ and endorses those who say He put them in the wrong body. Because to do otherwise is not loving; where ‘love’ means having one’s feelings affirmed. As one commenter stated, “Christians have gone out of their way to try to pander to women.” This type flourishes in the non-denominational “Jesus Is My Boyfriend” typeface of the Christian religion, where Jesus is at best a surrogate boyfriend. Where even so-called complementarians —as opposed to egalitarians—are too timid and anxious to speak of male headship without hedging with a thousand mentions of “servant-leadership”, thinly veiling the subtext that the women run the ship, and the men, husbands, and fathers are simply figureheads.

Lastly, the author notes how “rows of suited men nodded along.” This is an observation I wish to not only emphasise, but also justify. To justify why it is mostly men. As one may say that the more impersonal style of addressing these issues is “male-coded.” It is male-coded to appeal to intellect, argument, numbers, charts, and statistics. It is male-coded to “recite ontological arguments and academic jargon, losing anyone without a philosophy.” As Chesterton too noted,

“There is a pedantic phrase used in debating clubs which is strictly true to the masculine emotion; they call it ‘speaking to the question.’ Women speak to each other; men speak to the subject they are speaking about. Many an honest man has sat in a ring of his five best friends under heaven and forgotten who was in the room while he explained some system. This is not peculiar to intellectual men; men are all theoretical, whether they are talking about God or about golf. Men are all impersonal; that is to say, republican.7”

And this is good, actually. For I argue that it is an essentially male-coded task to pursue order first and foremost. Without which, women will be displaced in their feelings, as is already happening. To understand this view of things, it might be helpful to start again from the beginning. From Genesis.

In Genesis8, the author lets us know that when God created man, He made them male and female. That is, at the time when God conceived mankind, He made them essentially male and female. Yet, God formed man first9. In ontological language, we might say God gave potency and essence to male and female at the same time. But He offered actuality and existence to Adam first, keeping the woman in the waiting.

I do not suppose that The Creator was clumsy. Rather, I have full confidence in His judgment that He ordered everything for a purpose, as seen in the order of events. For we know that when He had formed the man, He put him in the garden to work it and take care of it. In fact, “no shrub of the field had yet appeared on earth…for there was no man to work the ground.”

He then put the man in the garden He had planted, and brought all the animals He had formed to the man to see what he would name them, “and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name”; nomen est omen. In other words, the man was tasked with setting his first house, the garden, in order. Only while at this task does it become pronounced that the man was alone and without suitable help, and this was not good. God then took the woman from essence into actuality and existence.

Upon seeing her, he ruptures into ecstasy and comes for the first time to self-consciousness. And true feeling. Before the woman’s appearance, the man had no sense of the personal, only the impersonal. In this way, the woman became the organ of man’s self-consciousness and true feeling. This, however, was contingent on order: man must tend to the garden before he can come to self-recognition. We might as well say that the man was not permitted such deep feeling and self-recognition until he had done his task diligently. He was not allowed to utter the word “My”, and the woman was not allowed to appear to him until he set himself first to work in the garden.

This myth and archetype still speak true to our hearts today. The seeming impersonality of dry intellectual work required to reorder civilisation must precede true and deep feeling. Men, who typically make up the right, are still setting themselves, whether consciously or not, at the task of ordering the principles required to furnish the figurative house which we shall make a home. Without which we will have “a world where nothing is permanent, where no vows can be expected to last.” The way to give young women “a way of life that meets their instinctive needs and doesn’t make them feel anxious or insecure or needy” is by recognising “some principles of order by which to govern ourselves10,” which the young women may not care about. Which is why, like Benedick, who could not afford to give his beloved Beatrice what she asked for, I fear that what Miss India asks from the right and conservatives (and the church) is a hard task.

Insofar as all is without form and void; so long as there is a garden to be set in order, it might not be the best thing for the right and conservatives to give what young women so ask of them. It is a hard bet. It is not a matter of lacking sympathy or a loss of listening ears. But it is a matter of darkness being on the face of the deep. Without light, creation is not even possible. What is possible, however, is first the retrieval of light. And with light comes true warmth and feeling.

Truthfully, warmth makes a house a home. And conservatism is at its most honest, a love of home and hearth. But we will not get a home without a house. It is unwise to stay in the open cold, and seek warmth by hugging each other in a naked therapeutic embrace now and again. What we must do is let the men get to building the house. After which, we trust the women to warm up the emergent structure with the depth of feelings that God has invested in their supply. The right owes the women order, and the women owe the right their depth of warmth and feelings.

I encourage you to read ’s essay at First Things to properly enter the conversation

The thought that it is good to have kids and a family of one's own; that it is good to love your family first before extending benevolence outside the home; that being tribal is good; that hierarchy is not only normal but good; that authority is not only natural but desirable; that parents should leave inheritances for their children; that aggression and combativeness in men is good and normal; that sweetness and grace in women is good and to be desired; that a father’s rule (the patriarchy) is good and beautiful; that aspiring towards ideals is right; that verbal acuity is good and preferable in women; that men “should not cry”; that men should repress their emotions; that all these things which now have bad reputations are good is something which the mind that takes “abuse” as its adjudicator for all things cannot accept. One more: generalisations are good, actually.

Even “abuse” has now been abused. Does this mean that “abuse” ceases to be good as a word depicting a real state of affairs? Not in the least. For abuse does not remove use. And although misuse may result in the denaturing of an object, we may not say that the object ceases to be fundamentally good. A hammer may be used to bash someone’s head in, but it does not make the hammer bad. For the hammer is fundamentally good, made for a purpose: to drive nails in. This does not make the hammer bad, fundamentally; it makes the use of the hammer both inappropriate and bad. Inappropriate —that is, improper— because in the more general case, one uses the hammer for a thing not its purpose; and specifically because the hammer was used as an instrument to produce grief. The hammer is good, even if used for bad ends.

As such, if one takes abuse as an excuse for discarding the baby, the one who discards the baby abuses “abuse” through misuse of such considerations. Because abuse is a good and right consideration to be had when dealing with things. Even “abuse” must be protected from abuse. To call just about any inconvenient thing abuse is to make everything into abuse, therefore making nothing abuse. Even then, abuse can only be rightly seen and considered in light of true and proper use. Abuse means nothing apart from good and proper use.

Which is why good and good use ought first to be considered. To begin considering what constitutes abuse before one settles what something is good for is to put, not only the cart before the horse, but even the tail of the horse on its nose. It is to take what comes after in the right order of things and put it in front. It is giving preeminence to the things which are actually posteminent. That is nothing short of abuse.

Therefore, if we consider that distinct and apart from abuse that some things are good, we are less likely and less willing to tear things down to pieces and try rebuilding them from scratch. This is the fundamental difference between the reformer’s posture and the revolutionary’s psyche: the reformer receives, accepts, and celebrates the fundamental goodness of things. He admits that there are given elements of life, society, and institutions that are good at their core, distinct from the decay, entropy, and corruption that follow closely after human things. The reformer receives the good and celebrates it. Which is why he is a reformer. Because he receives the sacred burden of maintaining the good and eradicating or minimising the corruption which now defaces the beauty of the good portions. The reformer, knowing the good he inherits, knows that —in the words of Sir Roger Scruton—“inheritance brings with it not only the rights of ownership, but the duties of trusteeship.”

The revolutionary on the other hand, does not so often receive the given good. He prefers to create his good apart from receiving it. And since he must make space for it, he may decide to demolish the current thing to its last bits so that he might construct his own edifice in its place. Especially also if he considers the current thing an obstacle to the “real” good he wishes to create. As such, the nuclear family must go; to give space to “free love.” The rule of the father must go, to provide room for the matriarchal nursery. Distinctive masculinity and femininity must give way to nebulous androgyny and a bubble cloud of “humanity, empathy, and connection.” In short, one may say that the reformer is a maintenance personnel, and the revolutionary a dreamer and architect.

But what is good is good, especially if it is well-ordered to its proper end. And even if it runs the risk of not being well-ordered, a good thing contains in itself the indication of its proper end; just as an orange seed contains within itself the potential to become an orange tree and eventually an orange. Notwithstanding whether this orange does not fulfill its potential.

Hierarchy then is good, for it is intended towards order, and order is the first need of man; else everything remains in chaos. Regardless of how those in these hierarchies may use them towards other unintended ends —unintended in purpose, not of man’s will, of course. As, for instance, when a governor uses his position as governor to impoverish the commonwealth and establish his lineage for life through stolen wealth. Even at that, the public’s ire against such an act and man draws from the fact that such a governor has abused his privileges and shirked his responsibilities. His actions, because they depart from the proper use of hierarchy, stir righteous anger in the observers and his subjects. And this anger is only righteous because the abuse contrasts with the right use.

Generally speaking, things tend toward abuse when they are taken either as things pointing to themselves and not a larger purpose, fitting into a grander whole; as when Orestes Brownson warns scholars in his An Oration On The Scholar’s Mission that

“The scholar’s mission is to instruct and inspire the race in reference to the general end, progress, for which God has made and placed us here…The mortal sin of every aristocracy, whether literary, scientific, military, or political, is by no means in the inequality it implies, produces, or perpetuates; but in the fact that it regards itself as a privileged order, specially endowed for its own special benefit.”

That is, good things as parts and members of a larger whole.

And the other, like the first above, when they are taken as a totalising principle; as the summary of all things, the one answer to everything, and the “one ring to rule them all.” Especially when the suffix ‘-ism’ gets unwittingly attached to such a thing.

I say unwittingly because I recognise the linguistic value of the suffix. It is one of those things that are good; in this case, especially because it helps us to transpose from particulars to abstracts; from things themselves to abstract names with which we can continue running a seamless ratiocination. Just as we see in technical jargon, which is itself useful within its domain, “ism” allows for smooth coinage and to transform tactile objects of thought into doctrines.

However, beyond this realm of language and doctrine, some take isms so seriously as to make all of life into what the ism is attached to. And this is noteworthy of ideologies, which, operating as a closed system of ideas, do so remotely and away from the things themselves, becoming Procrustean in their treatment of those things. As like when everything is looked through the lenses of a particular thinker, say Karl Marx, when in fact they do not cohere. As such, Marxism may be taken by some to be the theory that explains everything. Whereas the true thoughts of Karl Marx are at their strongest in the matters of politics and economics rather than metaphysics —although metaphysics may be implicated.

Again, one may not sneer at all isms. But you must decipher whether it is of good use or not.

To return to the things that are “good, actually,” I will briefly discuss the mildly controversial case of aggression and combativeness in men. It is especially mildly controversial for the reason that while many do not give it active consideration, they unconsciously hold that aggression in men is bad and only necessary because of the disheveled state of world affairs. They think of it not as an essential attribute of the masculine, but as an evolutionary trait and disposition developed for use as a species. They somewhat believe that in a utopia, where all needs are met and there are no chaotic states of being or need for survival, the aggression in males would wither and become at the least vestigial. I do not believe this is so.

For reasons that boys do not only need aggression and combativeness for survival, but also for leisure. Now leisure is the prefiguration of a perfect world. It is utopia locked into pockets and pieces of time which we earn here and there. Leisure is what all our striving is for. We strive at business so that we might be at leisure. Leisure is the culmination of work and business, and productive endeavours. It is our occasional glimpse of utopia. Leisure, contrary to common consideration, is not mere rest and recreation and preparation for more work. Leisure is the goal.

Yet, even while at leisure, especially while at it, men’s aggression is not abated, only redirected to leisure. As such, even leisure, at its best, requires the exertion of body and mind, whether in sporting activities or in intellectual jousting. One must not think of leisure as mere layabouting and idling. While at leisure, at bars, parks, and in every other site that men have always taken to relax together as men, aggression always proceeded in the form of arguments, debates, and all sorts of competition. Trust men to make fun things into sports, sports out of fun things, and even Olympic standard events out of the sheer competitiveness which emerges from a friend group.

Think of it, men have fight clubs to blow off steam; to obtain catharsis. Where women would cry instead—which is good, fitting, and proper. And given time, organisation, and willing sponsorship, those brawls and show of masculine prowess morph into global events which other spectators —largely men, participate in for a rush of leisurely adrenaline. Who is to say that we would not wrestle in our utopia? If, especially, of course, our utopia is organic and flowing from physiology, rather than synthetic, where our adrenaline is supplied to us through drugs and other means.

Men love the rush of this manly adrenaline. Whether they recognise or admit of such. Boys start to show you that they enjoy this rush of life. They do not know what it is used for (or even why it evolved if we may so grant it). But per intentionality, they can tell that they desire to rise and conquer —whether by brawls or brains—is something they would rather not have circumcised out of them. It is therefore a disservice to them to address male aggression and combativeness as nothing more than a utilitarian need which, now because it has been abused, must be cultivated out of those boys or make them into sweet male girls.

The idea that men should, “man up” is, in fact, good. For it contains the notion that men should act in a way that is fitting and proper to their constitution. Certainly, this can be and is usually abused. Yet, it is fundamentally good. It is good for men to rein in their emotions, to be temperate, and to express their emotions as appropriate to the correct object to which their emotions intend. Male aggression, combativeness, and competition are good, actually. As are so many other things which this essay cannot treat.

But we might at least mention some things which are “good, actually.”

• Loyalty to one’s tribe is good, actually.

• Kinship is good, actually.

• Hierarchy is good, actually.

• Inequality is good, actually.

• Authority is good, actually.

• Romance is good, actually.

• Marriage (as in monogamy between man and wife) is good, actually.

• Aspiring towards ideals is good, actually.

• Wanting kids from your own loins is good, actually.

• Indoctrinating your kids is good, actually.

• The patriarchy is good, actually.

• Men kneeling for kings rather than fawning over actors is good and dignifying, actually.

• [Fill in the blank]

All that God has made is good, actually. Valete.

Here, your meme.

“If anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary. All warmth derives from this love, all kindness and all humor. Indeed, to me it even seems that this must be that love of which it is written that one may 'speak with the tongues of men and of angels,' and yet, lacking love, be 'as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.”

—Tonio Kroger

I initially wanted to title this “Why I Am An Essayist Too”; as a sequel confession to an existing essay by the same title. But I have gone with the current title for reasons we will see going forward. But summarily is this: that I am an essayist because I believe in sentiments and prejudice; which I —or we—must defend for the health of the world.

An essayist is nothing but a literary philosopher who takes immense interest in the humanly concrete; especially the concretely common and commonly concrete. This is against the posture of the real philosophers who are always willing and ready to take the next escalator to the realm of forms and rules; who are content to speak as if they are settled on Olympus and are looking down on mortal men as they ruin themselves. The essayist, on the other hand, is at home with common experience, sharing in the general affections of mankind, who enjoys human things, the particulars, has a home, a people, a perspective; he is not squirmish of their prejudices and vices, and is not ashamed to call them brothers. The essayist, represented in figures like the eminent Sir Roger, seeks “a literary philosophy - not an ism but a prism, through which intellectual light would shine in many colours.”

Humanity is a mess. The human world is a jumble. As such, it is not neatly mapped, not easily categorised. It is not swiftly classified and smoothened. You can not even do it, speak less of doing it swiftly. For each attempt to domesticate it, the lifeworld rebels. It bursts at the edges; it consumes the map, chews its paper, and spits it back at us mockingly. The world is crooked. But most especially, the human world is crooked. As such, nothing straight, in Kant’s words, has ever been made from humanity’s crooked timber.

And this is the essayist’s strength; this crookedness. This mess. Realising its facticity, he sits at home in the world and keenly observes the motions of the lifeworld available to him. Recognising its immense jumbleness, he obtains no pressure to carve the world and fit it neatly into anything. Rather he is content with making sense of them on the fly and commenting on them without the critical system of the uber philosophers. Most importantly, he is not uneasy; he is not trying to flee from humanity’s troubles. He accommodates them as his own, which gives him twice the confidence to speak on them.

Opposed to this are those who despise the world. Who try to flee it —in different forms as it were. Some disappear too far and too long into abstractions. Others cling to categories. Some yearn for a future where we are merged with machines. Or where machines replace us. But the most common type of flight which the essayist must never engage in, is the flight from prejudice and sentiments. And the flight from perspectives.

There is something attractive about “objectivity.” That is, the sense of having a view or philosophy untainted by any motivation and passion. This appearance of impartiality, as if arriving from an extraterrestrial location to earth, without any prior experience to constrain judgement, a blank slate, is the flight of flights which men of “intelligence” seem to adorn themselves.

It is not uncommon to receive an allegation of bias. For instance, to call a man chauvinistic or bringing his bias to reading a text —such as the Bible, in my case. The allegation insinuates that I bring preconceived notions to a text and work the text to fit them. I honestly do not deny this possibility nor am I ready to refute it. Or just another like it, that thing CS Lewis called Bulverism, where my views are undercut by an interlocutor who says “you believe that just because you are a man.” Again, I am not here to respond to such statements.

Where my curiosity leads me instead is to ask whoever alleges this, what their biases are. It is not hard to see that those who say that my views are weak because they are motivated and prejudiced suppose themselves to be free of any motivation or prejudice. I come to the situation with a partial perspective, but they float in on heaven's cloud, with an aerial view of things, totally without bias and motivation and are the best judges of things. But I am to be granted no such privilege of judgement. A predicament particularly worsened by the canker of modern psychoanalysis eating into the world of thought and ossifying anything in its path.

It seems rather inconceivable that someone may advance a view by starting from a motivated position. Abominable it feels, to us, that one may start out thinking from a peculiar point of view influenced by all that his life has contained until the very moment.

Of course this myth has fairly succeeded because of the sense of detachment that the so-called hard sciences portray. That is, that scientists start straight and from nowhere; from an agnostic point of view and then work their way up to real knowledge. This is a myth now even as it was a myth in Francis Bacon and his virulent idols of the mind.

Just the most sincere introspection of one's thoughts and the fairest observation of the world allows us to see that these idols are all we have. No true and lasting item of knowledge has ever emerged from nowhere —that is devoid of past experiences, past and present passions, past and ongoing traditions, or even hope. Or loyalty, mercy, and love. The mere fact that we are embodied, and with this embodiment comes passions, sentiments, and prejudice, should suffice to kill the agnostic myth.

Even that thing we call curiosity is a slant; a motivation, a prejudice. Of all the elements and interesting things in life, why are you curious about and more interested in this one thing over the other? From whence come your love for Biology and your indifference, if not loathing, for philosophy? Many things float in the world, perhaps vying lightly for your interest. Then suddenly, you find yourself being attracted to one of these floating things over the others. One starts to shine over and above the rest of them. Your boots and heart startlingly gravitate to that one thing. For reasons you do not know. Or reasons you might afterwards find. Even philosophy begins with wonder, a posture of awe into things, without which enquiry is impossible.

This is all to say that prejudice, that nemesis of the modern intellect, is a foundation of knowledge and choice. By prejudice, I mean a slant to things, possessing a bent, a leaning or a starting preference.

To denounce our emotions, sentiments, and leanings in the making of knowledge is to descend into a subtle nihilism, implying that these things are void of meaning and are beyond evaluation themselves. If we have, as an advantage over the brute beasts, the ability to ask why, it is irresponsible to never put our instincts to the same test. In short, it is outrightly inhuman to denounce the contributions our common prejudices bring to the making of knowledge. It cannot thus be done; at least not without the danger of breaking the human.

Putting our sentiments then to the test of “why” offers us a means to evaluate them. Which means that we can decide ‘what’ makes up our sentiments and prejudices; and afterwards either justify or dismiss them. Giving us the advantage of taking a path different from the one commonly trudged by those who possess the greatest prejudice of all: the prejudice against prejudice.

This evaluative opportunity allows us to avoid agnosticism and pretend ignorance. It helps us to start somewhere concrete, however shaky, and to move towards things that may themselves be more noble and more trustworthy. It means, also, that although we are not agnostic, we can practice humility and true disinterestedness in our pursuit of knowledge, rather than lie to ourselves that we are most free of bias when seeking to know. And most especially, we do not have to renounce our greatest affections and loyalty, nor pretend that we do not have them just because we seek the most objective knowledge possible.

Shall we explore the full extent of removing all prejudice at once without evaluation? How far may we go in removing all prejudice under the aegis of sustaining prejudice against all prejudice?

If we might go as far as the prejudice against all prejudice will take us, we will find no surprises that we will dissolve and have no need for all familial bonds. Subduing all prejudice, parents will have no “reason” nor can they be justified in loving their children and aiming to leave them an inheritance. It becomes not merely a matter of indifference, but a sin and a crime, to show favour to one's child as a matter of spotlighting them over other children. The Monkey will thus be a fugitive from Jupiter for loving her child and insisting on its beauty. Children too will return the disfavour, spurning their parents because they owe them nothing.

Patriotism, under the sceptre of prejudice against prejudice, becomes a crime rather than a source of impetus. One becomes unlawful by being an amantissimus Rei publicae. It becomes unwise and socially impracticable to love one's own. And let us not forget why Rome was great— because she was loved.

On the allegations of chauvinism, who measures it? I sometimes wonder why my love for a group I belong to strikes an onlooker as sinful. And I am especially a democrat — I grant that whatever loyalty I offer my tribe, you should be able to do the same to your tribe too. That is the real democratic spirit. I grant you the right to insult me because I want the right to insult you too. I go to war —figuratively— for my tribe and I expect that you do the same too. If anyone is offended by my enthusiasm, calling it excessive, I wonder if I am the one excessive or if they are the ones short on passion.

But this is only still the amiable aspect to prejudice. Again, working with a less loaded version of prejudice, I mean a slant, a leaning, and a prejudgement. Or more accurately, a choice preceding (clear and articulated) reason. Like the instance of the natalists, who have a prejudice for progeny and procreation; who are thus usually hamstrung by the radical questioning of those who have taken arms against all prejudice. Prejudice, being a leaning, a pre-orientation, is also a constraint. And this is the less amiable version.

My people are easily deceived by the universal context. And I was once this “my people.” Who thought that the veridical power of some idea or text or essay resided in its lacking any particular and local context that may constrain it. I looked for the truth of such an idea, not in its potency to rise from within a local context and transcend it, but in its lacking the local context altogether. I found the opposite true.

All great works of literature have always been confined to a particular place, time, and people; that is the events. Notwithstanding, and paradoxically, its true power lay in this incarnational ability. With these events teeming with flesh and blood and culture, the universal ideas which are contained in that local context wear the local context like tendons, sinews, and skin. Where the ideas are bare bones.

The virtue in Homer is great because it is Greek. It is universal and humanitarian because it is particularly and locally Greek. One of my favorite qualities in Homer’s Iliad is the definiteness he gives his characters. For instance, “Axylus son of Teuthranus, a rich man who lived in the strong city of Arisbe, and was beloved by all men; for he had a house by the roadside, and entertained every one who passed.” That kind of specificity in Homer’s work is its literary strength.

Shakespeare might have written in English so archaic it sounds like spells of Anubis, but his wit and wisdom sound through the voice of lovers, kings, schemers, murderers, fools, and merchants. Socrates remains relevant because he was a man who refused to bathe but who loved to debate people in the market. His debates —while stinking everywhere up— today provide jobs and income for some people who now bathe, wear neckties and cannot debate to save their children’s lives. No great literature is produced from ‘nowhere’; from an agnostic spirit or lack of culture. True and good things drip with the passions and wear the face of men. Things without faces are an abomination. This is the potency of autobiographies.

To whom this might offend, consider that God leaned. That is, He constrained Himself. In that event called the incarnation, we see God constrain Himself. The omnipotent maker of the universe came constrained by choosing one of the two sexes, coming from one of the numerous nations on earth, and came through one of the particular tribes in a particular nation. He came in the most constrained way possible. He had as local as contexts can get. He was as particular as any person gets. The Apostles' creed tells us of His birth and his sentencing by a ‘Pontius Pilate.’ What does this mean for all the people He didn't choose to come through and the sex He was not? This clear historical outline, this choosing one thing and forgoing the others is a type of prejudice. A sub-theme of the incarnation, often missed, is that of particularity.

The temptation towards a dry light, a lumen siccum, a universality and generality unaffected by human passions and traditions remain strong with us. The urge for a non-refractive type of knowing remains a thorn in our flesh. We do not see as angels see; not all at once, at least.

I say this prejudice is a good thing. For the reason that all of man is geared towards communion. And there is no communion without prejudices and constraints. For prejudice is just unarticulated particularity; a love of the particular rather than an affection for the general. And communion, true intimacy, happens on the spine of the particular.

Oikophilia, the love of home, is an expression of prejudice, of the particular. I love my home because it is mine, a theme I have already spoken to in On Loving Your Own. The love of one’s own child, the honour of one’s own parent, the duty towards one’s own country, is the love of the particular.

I can say, with a particular boldness, that the love of the general over the particular hints at narcissism. Only disguised of course, it is a love of self; a closed system. I cannot express it better than Dostoevsky did in his The Brothers Karamazov:

“The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. I know from experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.”

One must love humanity, yes. But how shall we know of your love for humanity when you do not love the man in front of you? It is easier, without a doubt, to sermonise about loving everyone. It is much harder to love the garrulous sweaty neighbour who gets on your nerves. See, “humanity” is smooth, without contour, uncrooked, plain, beautiful, and does not chew loudly. But Janice is all the opposite of these things: she is not smooth, her contours are many, very crooked, not plain, uncomely, and chews louder than a rock band’s guitar. You may prove your love of humanity by incarnating all your love into loving Janice.

To commune with a particular human, you must come face to face with him. And this is what makes love scary: that there is truly an other who reserves the agency to receive or reject your affection. For the face, according to Dante, is the balcony of the soul. Whereas, “humanity,” without a face, is always willing to receive and never rejects one’s affection. Refusing escapism —of which the flight into abstractions is a type—then, is to descend from the general into the particular, local, and concrete. It is accepting the elements of the universal which stand before your eyes. A lesson to be learned by Lewis’ stories of Narnia: the children participate in an otherworld. But they always return to their world and bring the store of wisdom and gifts they have acquired in the otherworld to bear in their world.

This must be said of philosophy. No matter the linguistic contortion we perform, we must return to wisdom. The point of receding into abstraction is to the end that we might arrive at wisdom. And wisdom is particular, practical, thus prejudiced. She stands in the gates and shouts: she is not prim and proper, she yells at the gates offering her goods to men.

I know some readers have, with a squint and half an open-mind, questions. Are all prejudices good? If no, how can we evaluate and adjudicate?

The quandary is easily solved. I know the negative connotation “prejudice” carries. But I am not one to shy away from things bearing baggage. Not all things bearing baggage must be avoided. We must help to “carry one another’s burdens.” For there are prejudices for and prejudices against. This, I hope, starts to clear up the storm. The modern mind thinks prejudice, by default, is “prejudice against.” Just as also it thinks automatically of freedom as “freedom from” excluding “freedom to.” And this is the primary problem. The thought that uncritically repudiates all prejudice is of the same habit as the one that uncritically accepts all prejudice. Prejudices too must be subject to evaluation and adjudication.

Thus, the weakness of the prejudice against prejudice lay in thinking of all prejudices as bad and negative; in thinking prejudice is automatically against things. But prejudice may be for things. And need not be harmful. It may be indifferent to the things not its object of prejudice. It is not under compulsion to care for those other things. And this is a fair demand upon our limited, bounded, and finite human nature. So long as we must direct our finite resources —our love and attention inclusive—to things, we are condemned to choose. This might mean other options coming in second place and others being left out completely.

The solution, it seems, to achieve a world without prejudice is to have a world of complete sameness. A cosmos of interchangeable things; where nothing offers a distinct flavour that draws attention to itself at the expense of others. There we don’t have to choose, only have to dip one’s hand into a bag “full of red balls” —of which the probability of pulling a red ball is one. It is a procrustean world, chopping off everything that disrupts the setup and returns us to the state of crooked timberness.

I do not suppose that this is possible yet. Although flashes and seeds of this procrusteanism are in the nursery. In the form of increasing tendencies towards androgyny for achieving equality, the full charge against lifetime monogamy, participation trophies, and needless diversity quotas.

Let us not shy away from good prejudices and particulars. For true particulars strengthen, not destroy; polish not deface; beautify, not obscure, universals. Valete.

The point being that it is only unconditional love that does the true job of exposing parasites. Due to what is called “the debt of love.”

The “debt of love” is an intuitive and axiomatic impulse of the human heart which, upon receiving love undemanded, is immediately discomfited and unnerved, and angles to reciprocate this show of love and affection. This is to say that the human —homo sapiens— as a formal category is constituted towards the giving and receiving of love. Love is a fundamental need and a duty. As such, all of his being, well constituted and integrated, orients itself towards the show of love. Of which a show of love towards him stirs and ought to stir within him a welling stream of love. A debt of love is thus created in him by an initial show of love, from which he is propelled and compelled to show to others as well.

Because then love stirs love as an automatic function of love itself, our first and natural —and might we say healthy— response is to return this love; to settle this “debt of love” when we receive love unsolicited. Which consequently creates a healthy competition and a never-settled cycle of the debt of love. Therefore, we can say that the human heart, in an unbroken state, is perfectly primed for unconditional love. Owing to this “debt of love” that opens up on our account to unconditional love, we have the conditions for unconditional love.

And this is good. That our hearts create a debt of love. For this is how we know parasites: that no “debt of love” opens on the ledger of their hearts. No well springs forth from a parasite’s heart. The hearts of parasites are like a parched desert land that sinks water without a trace and gives nothing in return. For when a healthy heart, upon receiving love, by default plans how it might reciprocate, the parasite's heart feels no such anxiety. And this is how we know his heart is wicked. When you receive a huge show of love, parasitic acts become a revealer of a person's heart.

When a receiver of a show of love chooses to exploit rather than reciprocate this show of love, they show themselves to be broken —since they lack the axiom of reciprocity. And here ‘broken’ is a mild term to use for such a person. The more accurate term is “wicked.”

Parasitism is wickedness. But even wicked people can hide their despicableness under the banner of transactional love. But when a lover comes asking for nothing in return, a parasite is forced to give up the true posture of his heart.

Yet, I do not suppose those who think unconditional love is unrealistic will find this convincing. That is because the term “unconditional” is often misleading. Let us retire the term “unconditional love” and use the term “Sovereign Love” instead. For this better describes the type of love which we here consider.

For characteristically, love is unconditional or sovereign because the recipient of this love does nothing to earn it. It is a love freely given as an act of the will by the giver. It is the giver who determines, by his own rational will, to extend good volition to the recipient. And “good volition” is here important for us to zoom into. For “good volition” is merely two words to describe “benevolence,” itself taken from the Latin terms “bene” which means good, and “volentia,” which means will.

Supposing then that love is willing another's good, it is simply realistic and practical that we can extend “good willing” to someone else regardless of their previous actions. Whether or not they have done anything to earn it. Thus, it is a sovereign love because it sits firmly within one's rule to exercise regardless of external circumstances —whether parasite or not; whether chummy or not.

Friends, let us consider this term Sovereign Love and observe how we may rationally will someone's good whether they deserve it or not. We must not fear for parasites, for we don't truly know them just until we have first loved them. And maybe one day parasites will see the wickedness in their own hearts and repent; everybody wins. And even if they do not repent, you don't lose. Valete!

Happy Birthday to the (vain) author.

What separated Gandalf from Denethor was hope. Gandalf, who by all measures set the events of the Lord of The Rings in motion that could not be undone, knew the enormity of the task. He knew sufficiently the dangers therein. He knew the risks. He knew that the fate of Middle-Earth rested on the shoulders of one halfling. And that should things go wrong, all Middle-Earth would fall into Sauron's hands. This was their last stand. Gandalf thus, knew far better and more intimately than anyone, the details of the task; more than Denethor. But he refused to despair. Hope against all hope was the mantra.

This was not so with Denethor. Who, due to his position as Steward of Gondor, had access to the Palantiri, the seeing stones. Ensconced in the towers of Minas Tirith, he knew only a handful of the events in motion and was as such vulnerable to Sauron's trickery. Sauron, the dark Lord himself, who had successfully puppeteered Saruman’s lust for his benefit, found a vulnerable Denethor peering into the seeing stones and showed him just enough to drive him to gloom. The scene when Pippin enters the steward's presents this gloom:

There Denethor sat in a grey gloom, like an old patient spider, Pippin thought; he did not seem to have moved since the day before. (Bk 5, Ch 4).

Knowledge drove him to this gloom. But half-knowledge; if we can call it so. For although much of Denethor's reputation is attributed to his vast knowledge of things, of things happening far beyond his borders; things he knew despite not travelling out of his city in a while, knowledge that ensnares him to his eventual death.

This snare is to be expected of one who is puffed up with knowledge. Within a short space of time, Denethor had boasted various times of how much he knew. He vaunted of his decoding Faramir’s motive and gesture, accusing Faramir of desiring Gandalf’s admiration. This, of course, he lamented, Boromir would not have done. “For Boromir was loyal to me and no wizard’s pupil. He would have remembered his father’s need, and would not have squandered what fortune gave. He would have brought me a mighty gift.” He did not veil his contempt for Gandalf: “You are wise, maybe, Mithrandir, yet with all your subtleties you have not all wisdom. Counsels may be found that are neither the webs of wizards nor the haste of fools. I have in this matter more lore and wisdom than you deem.” Most importantly, he had such ostentatious faith in himself, as to believe that he could subdue The Ring and use it for heroic purposes without its overwhelming him “If I had this thing now in the deep vaults of this citadel, we should not then shake with dread under this gloom, fearing the worst, and our counsels would be undisturbed. If you do not trust me to endure the test, you do not know me yet.” Believing, with much certitude, that the solution to his gloom is the thing wreaking havoc on his city.

Nonetheless, despite all the gloom, Denethor showed some fight in him. There was a spark, a willingness to do battle: he marked out portions he was unwilling to yield and places he wouldn’t leave defenceless. Although he was reckless. He was ready to fight: “He stood up and cast open his long black cloak, and behold! he was clad in mail beneath, and girt with a long sword, great-hilted in a sheath of black and silver. ‘Thus have I walked, and thus now for many years have I slept,’ he said, ‘lest with age the body should grow soft and timid.’” Yet he was blinded by boastful knowledge: “Some have accused you, Mithrandir, of delighting to bear ill news, but to me this is no longer news: it was known to me ere nightfall yesterday. As for the sortie, I had already given thought to it. Let us go down.” He was the sort of person who found joy in pessimism —and people like this are not scarce.

Then Faramir arrived. Struck sick by a deadly dart. Then it happened “as he (Pippin) watched, it seemed to him that Denethor grew old before his eyes, as if something had snapped in his proud will, and his stern mind was overthrown. Grief maybe had wrought it, and remorse. He saw tears on that once tearless face, more unbearable than wrath.”

It was downhill from there onwards:

“The fool’s hope has failed. The Enemy has found it, and now his power waxes; he sees our very thoughts, and all we do is ruinous.”

“I must stay beside my son. He might still speak before the end. But that is near. Follow whom you will, even the Grey Fool, though his hope has failed. Here I stay.”

“Why? Why do the fools fly?’ said Denethor. ‘Better to burn sooner than late, for burn we must. Go back to your bonfire! And I? I will go now to my pyre. To my pyre! No tomb for Denethor and Faramir. No tomb! No long slow sleep of death embalmed. We will burn like heathen kings before ever a ship sailed hither from the West. The West has failed. Go back and burn!”

“Battle is vain. Why should we wish to live longer? Why should we not go to death side by side?”

(Bk 5, Ch 7)

Denethor was broken at this time. Irreparable. Faramir was sick, not dead. But his father had prepared him for burial. This was sacrilegious, so to speak, as Gandalf admonished: “Authority is not given to you, Steward of Gondor, to order the hour of your death. And only the heathen kings, under the domination of the Dark Power, did thus, slaying themselves in pride and despair, murdering their kin to ease their own death.”

Now, this must be said, noting Gandalf's admonition. Perhaps one that can be traced back to Tolkien himself. This is the character of despair at work biologically and sociologically. There is a dangerous mix of pride and despair found in men and women today as it was present in Denethor. Acquainted with the reams of knowledge as to the world's failing, whether via climate change or through some other form of impending disaster, they are filled with pride; pride that they know better than their forebears, and despair —the knowledge fills them with gloom. As such they drive themselves to neuter themselves; whether anatomically or psychologically or spiritually. Murdering their kin even before they get the chance to come into the world. For these people, as it was with Denethor, think that battle is vain and they must go down in death with the children they would have had.

Finally, Denethor showed his hand: the Palantiri; “Then suddenly Denethor laughed. He stood up tall and proud again, and stepping swiftly back to the table he lifted from it the pillow on which his head had lain. Then coming to the doorway he drew aside the covering, and lo! he had between his hands a Palantiri. And as he held it up, it seemed to those that looked on that the globe began to glow with an inner flame, so that the lean face of the Lord was lit as with a red fire, and it seemed cut out of hard stone, sharp with black shadows, noble, proud, and terrible. His eyes glittered.”

“Pride and despair! Didst thou think that the eyes of the White Tower were blind? Nay, I have seen more than thou knowest, Grey Fool. For thy hope is but ignorance. Go then and labour in healing! Go forth and fight! Vanity. For a little space you may triumph on the field, for a day. But against the Power that now arises there is no victory. To this City only the first finger of its hand has yet been stretched. All the East is moving. And even now the wind of thy hope cheats thee and wafts up Anduin a fleet with black sails. The West has failed. It is time for all to depart who would not be slaves.”

This, dear reader, is the voice of all who mix their pride and despair. Or one might say, that despair is a type of pride. Hope, an expression of humility.

Those who think they know; who think they have seen things correctly, that they have the full scope of things and events, who then because of this knowledge fall into despair and gloom, are proud. They think that all that their mind can conceive is all that there is. But those who hold out hope believe in something far greater than themselves, whatever that thing may be.

Some who despair, like Denethor, have grand visions of the world falling to its inevitable ruin whether by climate change or economic crisis. They, in their respective articulations, echo Denethor’s lament that “But against the Power that now arises there is no victory.” I am not one of such people.

I belong to the school of hope. And I write this to ask more people to enrol. I belong to Aragorn’s company; of Gandalf and Gimli and Legolas and Merry and Pippin at the Black Gates of Mordor. Even when you show me Frodo’s Mithril coat as evidence of our doom, my response remains “For Frodo.”

Abundant knowledge of our doom probably exists. Some even in respectable academic research, as to the world’s ending. Those who despair have gorged on knowledge such as this to drive their antinatal views. They say, not just that it is of no use to, but that it is wicked and selfish, to bring children into an ailing world.

This is a strange view: I stand on the mount that we humans, if we are the agents of destruction, we can as well be the agents who stop Earth’s death. If we are the destroyers, we can as well be its repairers. So long as we have our agency, we can do something. In this way, bringing children into the world is a vote for the earth; an incarnate decision to make this world a better place for those we bring into it. Nothing stands more defiant than living breathing incentives for us to do better. Whatever vision, by any strength and quality, that suppresses the reproductive, maternal and paternal desires that surge through our beings, is not true, and is only a manipulation from the dark Lord. Once a very perspicacious tweeter asked a pertinent question against the notion that improved education standards yield antinatalism. He asked, “What demon is hiding in y’all curriculums?” We all must answer.

Other types of gloomy visions exist in popular spaces and media. Gender wars seem to be at their peak. Men and women have swallowed the blackpill. Men now fantasize about scenes where the women they have neither found nor married would fleece them of all their property and ruin them. Or other negative fantasies of cuckoldry. Women also produce some hefty imaginings. And arrive at misogamic conclusions. This is Denethor’s gloom: they have looked into the palantiri that is social media and its bilious sentiments, and they have walked away bitter to the funeral pyres of their God-given erotic desires. No, all men are not dogs; all women are not whores.

But against all hope, we hope. Hope is a force of life. A human need. The means to a eucastatrophe. Without hope, one is unable to spot a miracle. Without hope, one never even walks to the point where help might come. “How can man die better/than facing fearful odds/for the ashes of his fathers/and the temple of his gods,” Thompson Macaulay wrote.

Here is an admonition dear reader:

“A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day! This day we fight!! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men and women!!!”

Aragorn’s speech at The Black Gates, Return of The King (2003) (edited for effect).

What we do not need is more despair and the surrendering of hope. What we need is a cherishing of what we have, what we share; which is one another. To be grateful for the gift of each other. With lifted spirits, to say “I am glad that you are here.” Rid yourself of all “mis-es” in your life: misanthropy, misandry, misogyny, misogamy. Let us cherish the gift of being and the being of givenness. The eminent Scruton said,

At the end of all our striving, we rejoice in our being and offer thanks. It is then, eating a meal among those we love, dancing together at a wedding, sitting side by side with people silenced by music, that we recognize our peculiar sovereign position in the world.

Dear reader, I am glad that you are here. And remember the words of the Prince of Paradox, Chesterton himself: “The one perfectly divine thing, the one glimpse of God's paradise given on earth, is to fight a losing battle - and not lose it.” Valete

Your meme

Wisdom, situated where everyone can see, removes the romantic vision of the guy who solves the riddles of Schrödinger's bird. It is strange. And worth contemplating that wisdom is an extrovert. She is unfazed —because she loves— the hurrying pace of the streets, public squares, and gateways. She, like every outgoing and energetic person, has no stage fright; she delivers her speech in the openest of places. Which, of course, stands contrasted with the adulteress who is shy of the light. And although you find her "now in the street, now at every corner," you are more likely to find her lurking in every corner.

While the adulteress’ lips drip with honey and her speech is smoother than oil, Wisdom is not polished: she is unrefined, coarse, as she “calls aloud in the street, raises her voice in the public squares, and at the head of the noisy streets, cries out.” But surely one can see why she shouts and is coarse in her delivery. For we know that despite all that she does to seize the people’s attention and deliver her goods to them, she goes unnoticed, unanswered, brushed aside, neglected, insulted, and unheard. This is wisdom’s plight, for although wisdom is better than strength, “the poor man’s wisdom is despised and his words no longer heeded.” This is no mere observation, but a truth concerning human nature at large. One might say the love of foolishness is a human staple. Wisdom and the adulteress are archetypal features of the human attitude.

As such, it should offer little wonder that common sense is no hero. Telling the obvious wins no prizes. Most importantly, common sense and the obvious, being Wisdom’s progenies herself, are cast aside because they are not shiny objects.

However, we may not cast them aside without great costs to ourselves. We start recording calamity upon calamity; disaster sweeps over us like a whirlwind, distress and trouble overwhelm us when we refuse to listen to Wisdom calling. When we refrain from and eventually trample on, common sense.

And the “adulteress” need not be an outright human prostitute or unfaithful woman. The adulteress may typify the seductive moves which draw us away from wisdom towards bitterness veiled in smooth words.

In other words, the adulteress may be something like the sophist who spins up very novel and quite interesting theories, causing us to abandon what we can see with our eyes, hear with our ears, and perceive in our everyday intellect.

The adulteress may be “The Advanced Science” that “lets us know” that there are more than two sexes; because intersex people and others with congenital conditions exist. By this, they mean that because some people are ambiguous in their reproductive constitutions, or that because some others have defective ones, we must rewrite what is common and taken for granted —taken for granted that humanity presents itself via two sexes and two sexes only.

These adulteresses may write books and tomes of literature to try upending what we take for granted. They write and publish in ‘respectable’ journals; sometimes in impenetrable prose to the end that we look upon their sophistication and abandon the fundamental trust we have in our senses and meagre intellect.

In philosophy’s domain, the counterparts of the above are even more sprawled out everywhere doing damage to common sense. No doubt one smells a whiff of true intellect in philosophical proponents of gender ideology. However, it does not take years of academic training to know that their intellect is futile as it produces the darkest objects and iniquitous calamities in our world as it is. It is not my scope here to demonstrate the futility of gender ideology. But I trust the reader to trust themselves and their intellect in believing that gender is a brute fact, a first principle of human nature without which our human nature has no departure point.

Yet within philosophy’s realm, we see ideas and statements such as the idea that something appearing in nature in fact makesa a thing natural. Some might say that if same-sex relationships are possible they must be natural. The so-called evidence of animals exhibiting homosexual behaviour is used to rebut the idea that sexual relationships have a right order; an order we call “natural.” For when we say that sexual affairs between men are unnatural, we are alluding to a sense of purpose and direction that points us quite stubbornly to the fact the complementary sexual organs and reproductive system generally tell us something that refuses to go away.

Or maybe that is a very scandalous example. Shall we take milder observations such as the idea that casual sex is ‘evil’? Surely, people sleeping with people they are not married to is a thing as common as leaves on trees and sand in the desert. One must live in heaven to have never met with real cases of fornication and adultery. Nonetheless, all human cultures battle the excesses of sexual deviancy in various forms and give marriage a special place; a sanctity meant to provide health for the rest of society. And societies which themselves play host to sexual deviancy do not quell this restlessness that common sense stirs in the hearts of everyone with a conscience; the sense that something is awry when sexual profligacy is the order of the day. Contrarily, by kicking against the goads, those who refuse to have their intellects defiled reconstruct those fences that religions knew well to erect. Only that these people, who almost often lack the courage to take up religion wholesale, reconstitute these fences weakly. But even more interesting is the fact that even when the diagnosis reports that we are suffering from a deficit of common sense, we still go chasing high-sounding ideas that provide euphoria without a cure.

I am always baffled by the high theorising of my fellow countrymen who say that what Nigeria needs is not strong men but strong institutions. These are the worst types of idiot savants I have met: having read all of Lee Kwan Yew’s exploits in Singapore, they imagine the rise of such leaders who will throw the Lego bricks in the right order and make everywhere good. These people always burst into flames when they hear that a nation rises and falls to the level of its common man. They imagine a world where the leaders will take charge of everything that the common man needs not to develop their moral faculties.

Is it not common sense that if a democracy must build strong institutions, it must be staffed by men of moral spine? But these fellows, adulteresses of the lowest estate, well-chugged on books but low in thought, wish for a well-oiled technocratic aristocracy to rise spontaneously from our current moral squalor. In all fairness, I agree with these thoughtless people that leaders steer society’s direction. But the pertinent question that they refuse to ask is “How shall these things be?”; especially within a democracy that relies on popular rule and choice.

They say, rather dismissively, that successful and developing nations succeed, not because they have a critical mass of good people, but because they have good leaders. I think twice if they think at all. Of the fact that in a democracy the elected leaders reflect the moral baseline of the collective. For democracies are the absolute demonstration of a bottom-up constitution of things. How do you expect a priest to win against a robber when the critical mass are robbers? Even a child knows that people vote for those who best reflect them. Yet, these people have read; they know the schema required to build a society from ashes into a Singaporean haven. But they neglect the most important thing: what moral system will produce the kind of people we need to lead us. Is it not true that one cannot give what one does not have? These people read and spin yarns of adulterous theories from their readings. But they kick common sense in the behind as they smoke on the hookah of sweet-sounding abstractions. One tablet of common sense says that democracy works when and only when the common man is Lord over his own spirit. But it is hard to say this to someone who prefers his novel theories over the common appearance of common sense.

And this is why it takes courage to be Captain Obvious. To point to the true datum and stick to it no matter how faint and wrinkled it is. It takes courage, as it is today, to point out that we know what a woman is, even if we cannot define it as to escape all assault. Through common sense, we know that such things as decency and modesty exist, even when we cannot plot them on a clear graph and be as exact as we would like to be; which is the favourite revolver of these adulterous rangers: to appeal to ambiguity on the matters concerning nature and society. Being all sophisticated, and despite that sophistication, we realise that the subject of beauty is prickly. Nonetheless, the meek mind knows and grasps that some things are beautiful and other things ugly. But the adulteress drives off the cliff of saying anything is beautiful because we say it is. Now the warcry is “everything is relative.” But we know what a woman is, we know all things are not relative, and we know beauty is one thing and ugliness another. Even if we cannot give unassailable definitions to these things. Our minds and intellects make sense of them even when our language is too handicapped to map it all. These adulterators and sophists rely on our linguistic limitations to lead the fainthearted astray. Remember, the adulteress drips honey from her lips and her speech is smoother than oil.

What then shall we do? Be Captain Obvious. With much magnanimity, say what your eyes see, what your ears hear, and what your mind perceives. For it is the first step of those who will ensnare us to urge us to distrust our own senses. They make men stumble over things that can be easily passed over. They dupe honest men into believing that the emperor wears invisible clothes.

Speaking of that, I reflect on Nassim Taleb’s dislike for Socrates —our delightful pedant —whom he interrogates with his alter ego Fat Tony. When, in the imaginative dialogue Socrates questions Fat Tony as to how he could use a word like ‘piety’ without knowing what it means, Fat Tony replies, “I don’t know it in words but I know what it is” and continues a tirade that Euthyphro in the Platonic dialogue by the same name could not conjure:

FAT TONY: “Tell me, old man. Does a child need to define mother’s milk to understand the need to drink it?”

SOCRATES: “No, he does not need to.”

FAT TONY (using the same repetitive pattern of Socrates in the Plato dialogues): “And my dear Socrates, does a dog need to define what an owner is to be loyal to him?”

SOCRATES (puzzled to have someone ask him questions): “A dog has … instinct. It does not reflect on its life. He doesn’t examine his life. We are not dogs.”

FAT TONY: “I agree, my dear Socrates, that a dog has instinct and that we are not dogs. But are we humans so fundamentally different as to be completely stripped of instinct leading us to do things we have no clue about? Do we have to limit life to what we can answer in proto-Brooklyn English?”

FAT TONY: “Then, my good Socrates, why do you think that we need to fix the meaning of things?”

SOCRATES: “My dear Mega-Tony, we need to know what we are talking about when we talk about things. The entire idea of philosophy is to be able to reflect and understand what we are doing, examine our lives. An unexamined life is not worth living.”

FAT TONY: “The problem, my poor old Greek, is that you are killing the things we can know but not express. And if I asked someone riding a bicycle just fine to give me the theory behind his bicycle riding, he would fall from it. By bullying and questioning people you confuse them and hurt them.”

I love Socrates, but he certainly did not know where to stop. And while he stands starkly different from adulteresses like Judith Butler, he remains in some sense their sane ancestor. Of course, a diligent reader of this publication knows the difference between a delightful pedant like Socrates and the painful pedant like those who, being locked in the ghost room of modern rationalism, ask ghastly questions like “why do you love him/her?” and “why do you want to have kids? (all reasons for wanting kids are selfish).” I have always said that these questions should not be dignified with answers; and I am pedantic myself.

But were we to attempt a response to those questions above, myself, being Captain Obvious —of all platoons in The Busymind Company containing about 300 soldiers— would say “I don’t know, I just love her”; “I don’t know, I just want to have kids, and I don’t care whether my reasons are selfish or not.” Will this suffice? For the adulteress no. But that is why they are adulteresses; they expect everyone to be dripping with lips of honey and speech smoother than oil.

However, wisdom is clear: love, being suprarational, brings its reasons after it like a litter of puppies. They trail behind, and are not the cause of the affections we feel. We are already in love before we know why. This is the wisdom of our bodies; reflecting the wisdom of our creator (have the adulteress convinced you we don’t have a creator?). In fact, I argue somewhere else that a (romantic) love stirred by “reason” is a dubious love. It best happens like the sunset—you don’t know exactly when it arrives, you just know that the day is bright; bright and fair. So it is with wanting children. The suprarational wisdom of our biological bodies understand something sophists will never grasp in their lifetime: that being is by default, better than nonbeing. That life is superior to nothingness. No amount of climate fears, wars, nuclear powers, alien invasions can stump the power of life and being that surges through our natural desires. These things are matters of givenness; they are gifts to us and we receive them with delight and without question. For givenness marks the beginning of all things. For why is there something rather than nothing, being rather than nothing? “To be” is always the answer to “to be or not to be.” It is only because beings are, that philosophy, the love of Wisdom herself, begins with wonder.

By being Captain Obvious, I mean here that against the cynical assaults of the endless skeptics, the nihilists, the adulteress, the sophists; against the tempestuous appearance of what passes for sophisticated learning, we must hold on to the things we have been given; to the things without which we can do nothing. We must grasp with both hands, the prephilosophical notions and data that makes philosophising possible in the first place. One must lock himself into the first principles that makes all questioning possible.

First principles such as the idea that there are only two genders. That love is a beautiful thing. Being is better than non-being. That the sexes, being fundamentally different in their constitution, affect how we order society. That family is the destiny of man; community is no mere added benefit for living, but the goal of living. That we are gifts to each other. That we owe the world: men owe the world their vision, their virility, their virtue, and their fatherhood. It should not scare us to say that women owe the world babies, their beauty, their delicateness and motherhood. Some things are more beautiful than others. Some people are more capable than others. Order is better than chaos. Incest is disgusting and homosexuality is unnatural. I urge the reader to fill in the gap.

Once these thoughts and ideas were commonplace. Now, the philosophasters and their adulterous ilks have swindled everyone. One cannot say “women owe the world babies” without being met with stares of misogyny. One cannot point to the unnatural and inconvenient acts of two men laying with one another. Now labels fly about. No one wants to be a bigot; even when ‘bigotry’ is the only thing that saves lives. To be Captain Obvious is to risk being a bigot; to risk being mocked. For it is not uncommon for someone to object that the idea that there are two sexes is “nursery school elementary science; try to get into the more advanced Biology.” Being Captain Obvious then is to, like the child in The Emperor’s New Clothes, point out that despite everyone’s pretensions, the emperor is in fact naked. Fairy-tales again provide wisdom over much academic labours.

I have said a lot. But surely people have written on this subject in better forms than I have. For if I were to summarise my thesis more succinctly, I would say that Being Captain Obvious is really just all what The Emperor’s New Clothes is all about. Do well to refresh yourself by reading it. Good luck.

A meme a day keeps the sophists away:

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Here I propose that instead of waiting to explain what cannot be explained to five-year-olds before we know we know something, let us take for ourselves the test that we don't know anything which we cannot carve a joke out of.

By this I mean, that, you don't know Euclid if you cannot make an original Euclid joke. You have much learning to do on the Trinity if you cannot make a Trinitarian joke —or at least a joke mocking Arianism. Better yet, there are no good social science jokes; except the ones mocking social sciences. So let's not even bother five-year-olds with that. A man ought not to be awarded a full doctorate unless he can bake a good joke out of his dissertation. Your doctor doesn't make a good medical joke? Be afraid for your life.

And the reason is clear why this must be so: to be funny is to be human. A funny man is a living one. A good laugh is the quickest and easiest act of rational judgment a man executes in his lifetime. Therefore, to give people something to laugh about from an area of expertise is to give people raw material for, and invite their rational status to, a quick game of judgment.

For the secret ingredient of humour is surprise. The mind delights in incongruity. Therefore, to take what appears to be a serious subject and fling it around to produce moments of surprise is to do genius work. In fact, it can only be genius work.

Let us not be carried away by the guy with a scowl so hard, and a tongue so fast when dishing out knowledge —as if he is rushing to the loo— as the genius. The genius is he, who knowing his subject very intimately, knows its tickle points. The genius is the man who knows how to make his subject perform a funny deed and thus to make us the observers laugh.

“Seriousness is not a virtue,” that giant Prince of Paradox once said. “It would be a heresy,” he continues, “but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”

Owing to this, I propose that every thesis, dissertation, lecture, and presentation ought to contain an elite joke. The joke, being elite, should be the sole conferment of eliteness on the scholar. This is not to say he will not be a scholar. But that he will not be considered an elite scholar. He is just scholar enough for us to call scholar as we turn our faces away. Or scholar enough to award him a “Ph” for his corrosive temperament and withhold the “D” so that we save the world from his boasting. Surely this way, we can know those who truly know their subjects; we will know those who we will discharge to the world and how; whether with flying colours, like the angels of God (for “angels fly because they take themselves lightly”), or like Lucifer who fell like a bag of yams. 

It was that philosopher turned mystic, Ludwig Wittgenstein who said, “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” Only a philosopher turned mystic could say something of such. Philosophers turned Lucifers cannot propose or suggest such. For they are always running to and fro seeking whom to devour with their endless proofs.

The Gentleman scholar once said something along the lines of growing up so that we can enjoy reading fairy tales again. This is true, and the spirit behind such utterance is as well true saying that we should look forward to a time when we can enjoy Tom and Jerry again.

For come to think of it, nothing marks the adolescent temper harder than the cynicism of wanting serious things. Now you want to “deal” with serious things. Because you believe that is what being an adult is —dealing with serious things. But we can allow this for a moment; just until you cease being an adolescent. Then we return to the basics of wanting to laugh again. Therefore in this matter is where the baby on his belly and grandpa on his stick find common ground: a need to have their bellies tickled. The other adults look on, wondering what wonders those extreme ends find in this.

Why is levity crucial to learning? The answer is simple: to learn to take oneself lightly. And this is essentially crucial today. That lacking a common literary canon that everyone deemed educated is expected to have read; or considering also that various subjects proliferate where it so happens that we do not have a certain common ground to runway and liftoff the crafts of conversation, everyone must bring tools which make conversation possible even among those who are not so versed in the literature. In other words, let us have debates consisting of jokes.

I have withdrawn from many a discussion upon hearing “You do not have the range for this discussion.” By this they mean “you haven’t read the exact things I have read on this matter.” It might look as if I exited for my deficiency. It is not the case. I exit because I have to go and intercede for my interlocutor’s stupidity. For with his Luciferian Ostrichness and with head buried in the sand and bum lifted to the earth, he loses all sense of his environment. That we, living at a time of hyperspecialisation and the explosive information age and meeting one another for the first time, it is not likely that I have read just the things he has read. He says that I haven’t read what he has on the matter. He doesn’t think that he has not read what I have read on the matter too. Lacking such awareness, I would fear to gift that man a mirror for Christmas lest he hurts himself by seeing himself for the first time.

It is for occasions such as this; occasions of literary inchoateness that I have nominated a new criterion. Bring forth, not your strong reasons that we might plead together, but your good jokes, that we might laugh together. You know now I think maybe Bomb Squads do not really need experts in chemical bombs and blue and red wires. They just need more comedians. Although I will burst into uncontrollable sobbing, like those knights of old, if ever a bomb was strapped to my chest and then Dave Chappelle strolled into my room with a microphone.

One objection, however, might be thrown at this. The objection that while niche, highly technical jokes are possible, the lay audience might not understand or appreciate it.

I understand this. I understand that it is rubbish. For if such objection comes, it means you have not been following this hallowed proposition from the beginning. 

Remember that in times past, the five year old decided whether you, an ardent student, knew your subject. Remember that everyone suddenly wanted to become the five year old that wanted things to be explained to them (“explain to me like I am five years old”). Why now do we want to run away from letting the audience judge your competence by your ability to make them laugh? If you construct the perfect neurobiological joke, but the audience lacks the brain to decipher it, did the tree really fall? 

No dear scholar, the criterion here being proposed is to construct a joke that stimulates a layperson’s interest to your subject. An invitation to your grand subject. If you do not give something to delight them, do not be surprised that they do not follow you.

This criterion is especially important for the sake of humbling —not to be mistaken for humiliating— the scholar. For it has always been the habit of scholars and intellectuals to turn up their noses at the laymen because they think learning some obscure but relevant subject —speak less of things like Gender Studies—gives them some superior standing. It has always been characteristic of men of learning to be pompous with the knowledge that others do not understand; even they might not understand it themselves, but the cloud and air of being learned is sometimes enough to cover their nakedness before the people. 

If the “five year old” madness had any truth in it, it was this: the audience is as much a participant in knowledge as the teacher. As such, the audience may withhold their approval and leave the intellectual to enjoy his knowledge for knowledge sake. The intellectual may convince himself that the laymen need him. But the truth is he needs them more. 

It is still yet common for these pompous men of learning to come and screech that we should “trust the experts.” Jokes on them, I trust no man; the arm of flesh fails and the expert’s arm fails expertly. My trust is in Christ alone.

Now that my heart is in the ring with this proposition, I must drop a caution and a word of warning. The hat is deceptive, who can cure it? As such, after realising the genius in making people erect jokes to validate their cumbersome learnings, a thought immediately enters the head of some. It is that temptation that has followed every good thing in this world: the temptation of “let’s teach so and so in schools.”

The reader knows the type. Once critical thinking arrived on the scene, they all started, like fangirls screaming, “Let us teach critical thinking in schools.” Then it was financial literacy. So they went “Let us teach financial literacy in schools.” Then it was how to turn stone into bread; “let us teach turning stones to bread in schools.” Worst but not the waist, fractions; so they said, “let us teach how to calculate taxes in schools.” I prohibit such temptation to accompany my proposition. 

Let it not occur to anyone to say, “Let us teach how to make good subject-matter jokes in schools.” I endured the one of critical thinking; as I endured the one of fractions and financial literacy. If you say, “Let us teach humour in schools,” I will say “Let us teach how to burn down schools in schools.” You have my ward.

Lastly, I must lead by example. I must tell a good joke. Here goes: why should I? I am not a scholar.