- Runaway Capitalism
- Francis Schaeffer and Dominionism.
- The national purpose conundrum.
- Argumentum ad populum writ large.
- At the movies.
1
Distributist Review seems to have started some kind of (occasional?) series on runaway capitalism. Yesterday brought two examples:
- one historic (Colorado’s 1914 Ludlow Massacre, a notable example of government lethal force to protect capital against labor) and
- one current (Monsaton’s Roundup literally encourages the growth of Fusarium fungus at the roots of plants).
2
Bloggingheads bat around the Dominionism charges about certain GOP candidates. Elsewhere at the Times, Ross Douthat tries to set the record straight on whether Francis Schaeffer called for violent revolution, but his correspondent Ryan Lizza may be incorrigible.
Douthat’s right, but there’s no doubt that Schaeffer became very politicized in his later years, as his son Frank has chronicled and will continue to chronicle until he finally becomes a pensioner and doesn’t have to feed his family by cranking out religious right kiss-and-tell books for his new liberal audience.
3
I’m not acutely worried about people from different places with darker skin making babies faster than Western Europeans (HT WSJ), but I do worry that the the only glue holding us together is <synecdoche>the mall</synecdoche>.
At the same time, the Constitution prohibits a national religion, and it’s been interpreted to prohibit state religions, and I don’t much care for anti-Communism or anti-terrorism delusions binding us together, either.
Is this insoluble? Is every “national purpose” either unworthy of people who bear God’s image or Constitutionally prohibited?
I suspect so. But I think the quest for national identity is itself delusional. Better to love a particular place dearly than to seek meaning in grand national hubristic crusades of any sort.
Love of particular place is part of what Front Porch Republic is about, and it publishes today a piece on England’s “Red Tory” theorists and their Canadian counterparts, including George Grant:
[W]hen asked by Gad Horowitz in an interview, if he thought that the cultural revolution of the 1960s might be a way out of the liberal dominance of society, the technological trap, that it might be leading somewhere (the predictable question of a progressive), Grant replied:
“’Leading anywhere?’ Not if you mean change of the society as a whole. The society is given over to mammoth technological institutions and there are certain requirements given in the nature of these institutions that you cannot escape. But it is, luckily, a very rich society, therefore a lot of people can drop out and take its benefits while living outside of it…. I think people who try to make new living institutions – you know, family schools, and other forms of institutions – in this society are just magnificent.” (“Technology and Man: An Interview of George Grant by Gad Horowitz”, Collected Works, III)
“Drop out.” I seem to have heard that before. It may be our way forward, if “forward” isn’t too tainted with progressivist overtones.
4
Ruth Marcus is horrified by Rick Perry. I hope nobody was fooled into thinking her horror was brilliantly expressed. Carson Holloway takes her horror apart, piece-by-inane-or-fallacious-piece.
It is, no doubt, a tough gig to have to write on schedule, and having spent the time to read Fed Up, the temptation to write something stupid, instead of writing nothing at all, must be strong.
5
The preceding item doesn’t sound all that tasty (it’s better than it sounds, if you like liberals being exposed as less brilliant than they imagine), so here’s a poetic reflection on, of all things, a James Bond movie.
Bon appetit!
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 