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of course l affaire kavanaugh brought us a determinate contact point regarding mob justice neither side was really invested in the idea of getting to the bottom of things both sides merely crammed facts into their hypothesis and let the chips fall where they may yet much more serious to me was the fact that in real time we watched as senate democrats finally cashed out the very last penny from the public trust i don t believe that the progressive left truly understands the damage they have done before september 2018 republicans at least made a pretense that the democrats really would observe due process instead we were treated to a spectacle of shame followed by the outrageous behavior of a mob pounding on the doors of the u s supreme court some have said that if the democrats truly believed that the u s constitution represented the values of white supremacy and rape culture they would be arming themselves and actually holding a revolution not merely intimating violence yet that intimation of violence is precisely the problem in the week after the kavanaugh confirmation the political talking point was to act like trump the chattering classes on the left at first tried to fob this off as metaphor then pounced upon a pennsylvania governor s remarks that of course could not possibly be metaphor what bothers me intensely is that we are getting to point in this country where we are treating our neighbors as a metaphor this metaphorical they is looking to steal your income deny you basic human rights even enslave you to their will in many ways the father of identity politics wasn t barack obama though his campaign certainly weaponized it in a way we have never quite seen before in modern american politics rather the idea that one is either with us or with the terrorists was a talking point of president george w bush many will argue that we have seen such times before japanese internment camps during the second world war anti german laws during the first world war the suspension of habeus corpus by president lincoln the confiscation of loyalist property during and after the revolutionary war yet if the end state is really a condition between us and them who are us senator ben sasse pens this article for the wall street journal wondering whether loneliness is the condition that is afflicting american society lone li ness is every where in the u s across every sec tor of so ci ety a sur vey of more than 20 000 amer i can adults con ducted ear lier this year by the health in surer cigna and the mar ket re search firm ip sos found that a ma jor ity of us are lonely based on re sponses to the ucla lone li ness scale the high est scores were re ported by the youngest adults ages 18 to 22 the re searchers de scribe it as a lone li ness epi demic none of this should sur prise us amer i cans to day have fewer shared projects than our par ents and grand par ents did and we be long to fewer civic groups be cause we change jobs more of ten we have fewer last ing work friend ships we de lay mar riage have fewer chil dren and live in larger homes more sep a rate from those of our neigh bors we move from place to place for re la tion ships eco nomic op por tu nity and bet ter weather and we end up with eco nomic op por tu nity and bet ter weather some good things to say here but i think ben sasse misses the point it s not loneliness that is plaguing the american public but mediocrity in short we have become a vulgar boring people and you can see it every day on social media legacy media commercials entertainment sports etc our loneliness isn t the problem we re just not interesting anymore neither to ourselves or to one another so we have to manufacture virtue rather than work on becoming better more interesting people turns out virtue can t be purchased so we opt for wit humor condescension and the like rather than insight relevance and dialogue is it a problem of education perhaps so what i do know is this the solution here is very simple but it s not easy empathy and character only get folks to a certain point but they are useless without dialogue and while we have taught ourselves that emotive is rewarding and disengagement is the best defensive measure rarely do people discuss ideas trying to understand the perspective of they but rather with the objective of asserting the power of us perhaps this is the logic of power and perhaps power is always a zero sum game where anyone outside of us is a pathogen to the body politic that must at all cost be destroyed yet as i grow older and re read the things i have written in the past one concept occurs as inescapable that i am a christian personalist in a world that is neither christian nor personal for instance most people will readily identify themselves as republican or democrat whereas i would places such terms in the very last of the ordinal hierarchy of labels a conservative before i am a republican a virginian before i am a conservative a christian before i am a virginian and my catholicism as the fullest expression of who i am and what i believe that s me my family my core i have been a tremendous fan of montaigne s essais ever since picking them up many years ago in fact the proto blogger himself and the father of the essay sadly more recently i have found myself picking up and reading through victor klemperer s essays and diaries he collected as he survived nazi germany before enduring the german democratic republic my thoughts have been drifting towards the spanish civil war and its root causes the grasp for power the decline of institutions the blind fanaticism of the spanish nationalists fascists and the spanish republicans communists one can only imagine how fr jose maria escriva must have thought during that time as he was founding opus dei enduring both the persecution of the communists and the recriminations of the fascists one of my favorite films of all time is fritz lang s 1927 metropolis which begins with the epigram the mediator between the head and the hands is the heart thea von barbou lang s wife who penned the script for metropolis had the catholic church in mind as that institution which welds the aristocracy to the demos yet even a cursory look at the catholic church both in america and in europe finds a catholicism convulsed by the power struggles of secular religions interposing upon the sacred one is either a conservative catholic or a liberal catholic i am neither i just want to be a catholic it is difficult to see things one believe as settled be overturned in a matter of years once upon a time i did not believe that racists could occupy positions of power in the republican party much less in virginia and i was wrong once upon a time i believed that violence in the public square was something to be abhorred by both sides of the political spectrum and i am being proven wrong again i believed and was taught that what was unique about america was that we would allow 100 guilty men to go free if it prevented the conviction of one innocent man whereas the soviets would plow through 100 innocent men to get to a guilty one and i see that spirit dead in america today i believed that to be a good catholic one had to feed the poor visit the sick clothe the naked rebuke the oppressor and hunger for righteousness and i see that our own bishops do not believe much less practice this most of all i believed in a certain jeffersonian optimism that if people were given the tools to be self sufficient and create better lives for themselves and their families they would one feels as if this presupposition this confidence in the american person is being eroded daily by those who simply cannot leave their neighbors alone or worse by those who demand positive rights from society thou shall rather than keeping to negative rights thou shall nots that fundamentally undergirds this grand experiment we call america in short i see too many people willing to become a part of a mob willing to give up their own humanity in order to matter willing to sell out the humanity of others in order to gain a little temporary advantage we have commercialized the sacred and sacralized the commercial we treat mediocrity as excellence and treat excellence with a vulgar contempt we disguise ideology as fact while dismissing facts as ideological privilege sociologists will tell us that every generation thinks the world is going to hell in a handbasket others will tell us that the long arc of history bends towards justice but these are both lies we tell ourselves adult fairy tales so we can sleep at night and not worry about being responsible citizens the very fact of the matter is that something broke in the american public this september and it will not be easily fixed battle lines are being drawn clear ones ones that break the heart of anyone who reads their history those of us who are climbing into plato s cave to sound the alarm can only articulate a handful certain truths to those too deaf to hear history is bloody and violent not just and that banking on the civility of others while practicing none is a grift it is not progress and it certainly is not politics st padre pio would tell us to pray and do not worry for one i pray and worry intensely not because i worry but because one can only feel tremendous sadness at what we have chosen to become we can t blame social media nor can we blame liberal institutions or fox news soros or koch the fault dear brutus is in our stars perhaps this is what brings me to the moynihan quote some 55 years after the news that president john f kennedy had been brought low by an assassin s bullet mise éire this is the curse of the irish to know that in the end this world will indeed break your heart if this is truly the endgame of the demos in america then i find myself as fr gabriel in the mission speaking to fr rodrigo if might is right then love has no place in the world it may be so it may be so but i don t have the strength to live in a world like that rodrigo of course we can stop this at any time we choose the question remains do we have the courage to do so if courage is rooted in humility and violence in pride then i fear we have much work to do both individually and collectively update a reader helpfully forwards the following two posts from econlib one much more recent the other from 2014 once you identify with any large unselective group you will be regularly tempted to commit the villainous act of standing up for your groups villains when they do wrong as they inevitably will your impulse will be to ignore minimize or justify their misdeeds to quote the underrated 8mm if you dance with the devil the devil don t change the devil changes you shades of kierkegaard s the present age as he discusses how human beings will do the most terrible things to one another in the name of principle it is acting on principle which does away with the vital distinction which constitutes decency for decency is immediate whether the immediate is original or acquired it has its seat in feeling and in the impulse and consistency of an inner enthusiasm in this way everything becomes permissible if done on principle the police can go to certain places on official duty to which no one else can go but as a result one cannot deduce anything from their presence in the same way one can do anything on principle and avoid all personal responsibility people pull to pieces on principle what they admire personally which is nonsensical for while it is true that everything creative is latently polemical since it has to make room for the new which it is bringing into the world a purely destructive process is nothing and its principle is emptiness so what does it need space for but modesty repentance and responsibility cannot easily strike root in ground where everything is done on principle emphasis added soren kierkegaard the present age 1846 caplan offers a solution of a sort never identify with large groups only with small ones which is a solution of a sort but more benedict option than grand solution after all small tribalism doesn t seem like the solution to big tribalism it s rod dreher misinterpreting alasdair macintyre while refusing to grapple constructively with the idea that yes we do have a moral responsibility to be a part of this great big messed up world of ours and i pull specifically from romano guardini s the church and the catholic on this point one grand solution that caplan does point towards is the recent kerfuffle over robin hanson s admonishment that we once again take people at face value and quit presupposing their motives let us instead revert back to the traditional intellectual standard respond most to what people say and don t stretch too hard to infer what you think they mean in scattered hints of what they ve said and done one presupposes that we are all muck farmers now everyone racks up the suppression points and only then can we have a conversation doesn t quite seem like an ideal starting place now does it posted in essays politics 1 comment a small but heroic return posted on june 28 2018 by shaun kenney twice i have attempted to shut down this public journal once before in 2007 when i took on the responsibility of representing the republican party of virginia as their communications director under happier times with ed gillespie as chairman and the inestimable charlie judd as executive director and once again as i merged my own writing into other projects the list of projects thus far is not a very long one and almost all of them have been digital publications in a way that i felt i could get thoughts off of my chest and into public consumption bearing drift was the first and longest lasting of these experiments followed by the revival of the jeffersoniad before moving to the republican standard other publications kind enough to take my scribbling have been digital journals such as ethika politika and the wanderer the oldest catholic publication in the country and a mainstay of catholic traditional thought in truth writing for der wanderer has become one of the most pleasurable experiences allowing me to express my faith to fellow travelers and it helped me discover what i missed about my own writing today continue reading posted in essays 2 comments the top 10 banned thomas jefferson quotes of all time posted on november 14 2016 by shaun kenney a handful of faculty and a ton more students at the university of virginia decided to sigh a petition entitled co sign an e mail to university of virginia president theresa sullivan that might as well have been titled please tell the alumni to stop giving to this university from the cavalier daily some professors from the psychology department and other academic departments did not agree with the use of this quote their letter to sullivan argued that in light of jefferson s owning of slaves and other racist beliefs she should refrain from quoting jefferson in email communications we would 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