…being
random thoughts recovered from my Facebook page upon my abandoning it…
Capitalism
in the service of a ruthless materialism is the compulsive force in the
evolutionary reality in which we find ourselves.
A
genuinely free society must choose between the only two possible solutions to
the vexing problem of "income inequality," taxation or philanthropy.
Born
to a father nominally catholic and a mother nominally anglican, I was baptized
a catholic. My foundational years were spent in a succession of catholic grade
schools, my puberty passed in a catholic high school, my "higher
education" was undertaken in a catholic university. I spoke my marriage
vows before a catholic congregation and set my infant son as far as possible
along a similar catholic path. I retain nonetheless the dogged hope that by the
time of my dying I might have sufficiently surveyed this world and its symphony
of confusions to be at last finally and actually catholic.
To
the generally accepted classification of root personality types, the introvert
and the extrovert, I would propose the addition of a third, the controvert.
In
prioritizing the list of threats to the security of the nation and the world,
it would be wise of our leaders, religious and political, to keep in mind that
the definitive manifestation of climate change is nuclear winter.
In
a democratic and pluralistic society politics is essentially a language art.
Its best practitioners demonstrate the rare ability to tell a half-truth so
convincingly as to elevate it to the level of a dogma and by doing so to win
elections. The pity is that governing requires an entirely different skill set.
~ Barrett
Grinnen, "Demos and Dunderheads"
The
problem with atheism as a spiritual position is that it's eschatologically
unattractive; there's no future in it.
I
have been indoctrinated (as indeed I imagine have we all) to hold that
diversity is a virtue, a bedrock value of American consciousness and a
wellspring of national strength. I have my doubts. That America comprises a
myriad of races, of nationalities, of religions, of souls across vast ranges of
development and education is certain and confirmed by the simplest observation.
But that this diversity is, in and of itself, virtuous, valuable, or
strengthening is much more open to question. Several weeks of steady attention
to the evening news is all that is needed to prompt a contemplative pause, and
a single full lifetime's disjunct recollections --- sixty, seventy, eighty
years’ worth --- is, for some souls, sufficient to bring thought itself to a
dead halt: a diversity of ignorance yields no worthy philosophy, a diversity of
evils is no paradise.
There
is a difference between an ideology and a faith: an ideology constellates
around a thought, a faith around a Being. We fail to make the distinction at
our peril.
We
are born and we die. These are the certainties. Everything in between is simply
education.
War,
economic disparity, intolerance, religious terrorism, environmental
degradation, social injustice, climate change: of all the long list of ills
that imperil the continued existence of the individual, the nation, and the
world none takes precedence over man’s denial of the very idea of God.
Money
is the instrument of the self-regulation of a free society. Currency --- the
circulation of money through such a society --- is the metric of its health and
the balance of that circulation the guarantor of its continued liberty of
action.
A
meme may be the effervescence of a thought bubbling to the surface of a
consciousness fixated on the visual, on image, but it does not itself
constitute an actual thought. In terms of thought, it bears the same relation
to intellect as does a punchline to a joke, a belch to digestion.
I
have often heard it said that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. I
append to that thought this: the luckiest among men lead lives of quiet
exultation.
In
any sane theology tolerance equates to “love the sinner,” acceptance equates to
“condone the sin.” The former is requisite, the latter untenable.
The
fact that I disagree with you steadfastly, cannot accept the prime terms of
your argument, and so state openly and without reserve as occasion warrants
does not constitute hate speech.
I
am told that in an effort to be precisely correct and avoid inflaming liberal
passions obstetricians have now begun marking the gender question on birth
certificates as “To Be Determined.”
Any
American who believes it possible to keep religion out of our politics clearly
understands neither religion nor politics.
History
is the sole competent court of human affairs, whether individual or national.
I
have had the rubric written in bold scarlet across my political consciousness
that we are “a nation of immigrants,” a thought I sometimes find deployed in
service of substantial mischief. Perhaps it would better help to negotiate some
of the difficulties latent in that thought to refine it thus: we are a nation
of sovereign citizens whose forebears were once immigrants.
Proposed: a more purely secular
rewrite of the document to better suit the spirit of the age…
We
hold these assertions to be rationally defensible, that all humans are born
equal, that they are entitled by the simple fact of their birth to certain
fundamental privileges, chiefly the sufferance of their living and dying.
---That to manipulate that privilege Governments are imposed upon them,
deriving their inescapable power from the distraction of the governed, ---That
whenever any Form of Government lets slip its power to so delude it is the Prime Opportunity of the governed
to each restore their individual clarity of thought and to alter or to abolish
blind allegiance to such Governance, to establish new Governance internally,
laying its foundation on principles more lucid, sane, and proof against the raw
ambition of others and organizing its powers in such form, as to them seem most
likely to preserve moral self-governance. Prudence, apathy, and the
understandable human abhorrence of the effort required for genuine self-control
will indeed usually dictate that Governments long established should not be
changed, period; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that human
majorities, repeatedly duped and ill led, are nonetheless more disposed to
suffer evils, while evils are more comfortably sufferable than is lucidity,
than to right themselves by abolishing the forms by which they have been
subjugated. (Still, sooner or later, there comes a point when the soul says enough
is enough…)
Life
lesson: it is true that to be fully human in this life requires one to keep an
open mind. It is equally true that to be fully human in this life further
requires one to determine when to close it.
I
have come to the conclusion that, contrary to a general distaste for such a
project and despite our recent and repeated failures therein, “nation building”
is indeed a noble pursuit and worthy of our effort. Let’s start with this one.
Diversity
is a virtue only to the extent that it is deployed in defense of civilization,
and a glance along the arc of evolutionary consciousness leads one to conclude
that only that which we style western civilization has hazarded the attempt to
so deploy it.
Short rumination on the Golden Rule:
As
a guiding principle to the conduct of life and the construction of reality
“Live and let live” is the natural and logically consistent consequence of the
dispositive reciprocity of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”
and is morally the sole acceptable operative construct right up to the moment
when some Other says, “I want you dead.” Then all bets are off.
I have heard it reported that, nationwide, membership has
been surging in the newly formed women’s group the Lady Macbeth Society, their
motto being “Unsex Me Here.” (And we all know how that turned out.)
Our
politics would improve immediately and exponentially were we to shift the focus
of our conversation from our rights to our obligations.
The
most dangerous of all political locutions, regardless of whether the speaker
represents government authority or the popular will: “We must all….”
I
labor daily with a mighty resolve and with all the resources available to my
thought to understand the obvious insanity I observe all around me, but I must
admit that the effort tends to produce a state of mind best characterized as
unsettling.
Visit
art museums often enough and you put yourself in grave danger of developing
over time an inkling of an esthetic, an unsettling acquisition in an age so
disjointed as this.
Observing
the actions of any and all of the myriad of fractious communities that
constitute the national polity --- the rich, the poor, the young, the aged, the
elite, the oppressed, the hale, the injured, the educated, the ignorant, the
believer, the atheist, all of them --- it seems to me that for each without
distinction its self-interest stands in need of serious enlightenment. That
such is forthcoming appears unlikely given the current enfeeblement of our
educational institutions and the consequent impossibility of civil discourse.
In
assessing the answers to most questions of moral thought, action, or governance
wherein Church and State entirely agree, you can be fairly certain that one or
the other of them is either mistaken, insincere, or lying.
The
most puzzling thing about modernity is that in a world so suffused with
knowledge there is so little wisdom.
Even
a cursory reflection should make apparent that the First Amendment to the
Constitution in barring the Legislative Branch from making any law “respecting
an establishment of religion” does not thereby formally commit the polity to a
state of irreligion. Indeed, the second half of the clause, “or prohibiting the
free exercise thereof,” ensures against such a state. It is a cause of
confusion to aver that we are a Christian nation. A more correct --- and
statistically supportable --- locution would be that we are a Christian polity
in a secular nation. This secularity is incumbent upon and enshrined in the
government structure, not thereby in the individual nor in the common psyche of
the people. To be an American does not commit one to disbelief or
indifferentism.
That
which can be neither proved nor disproved can only be believed.
“One
must always be careful lest one’s arguments cripple one’s thought.” Advice from
an older dialectician.
Live
as though forgiven.
My
heart’s deepest desire: a perfectable marriage and sufficient lifetimes to
perfect it.
“Time
moderates the sins of an honorable man. That’s what makes him honorable.” A.
Burnbridge, “Penitent: A Revisionist
Teleology” in Eschatology Today, vol. 16, no. 2
As
a slogan “America First” is but a slight distance from “Physician, heal
thyself.”
“The
rearrangement of the material of the world is entirely a consequence of
thought, which is not a material process, the assertions of neuroscience
notwithstanding. To be a free being in this world is to live constrained by matter
and yet to remain essentially beyond its reach. It is upon such reflections
that one may begin to build a theology.” Burnbridge, Alexander. The Inconsequential Wilderness: An
Interior Cosmology
I
have been told repeatedly that “we are a nation of laws,” but consistent
observation has led me to suspect an error in the transmission of that
assertion and that it should more properly read “we are a nation of lawyers.”
Further, I have come to question whether we are indeed a nation so much as a
commercial enterprise and to conclude, at least tentatively, that a more
accurate locution would be that “we are a commercial enterprise governed by an
oligarchy of lawyers.”
I
do not argue with my wife. Somewhere in the course of nearly fifty years of
marriage it occurred to me that doing so was simply looking in the mirror and
arguing with myself.
Absent
the idea of God, there is no morality
only legality, no will only coercion, no grace only force.
It
guts reality to hold that only that which is apprehensible through the senses
or the varieties of their technological extensions can be held as actual, as
true.
I
have been schooled from my youth to hold that a bedrock doctrine of our form of
government is immutably enshrined in the formula “one man, one vote.” Consistent
reflection over the course of succeeding years, however, has led me to conclude
that the principle would be more properly phrased “one citizen, one vote.”
The
root aspiration of the American political form is the creation of a fair model
of what might justifiably be called heaven on earth, a polity wherein peace,
justice, liberty, and harmony prevail. What we know of history, however ---
that of America and that of the world --- as well as our long-arc understanding
of the nature of humanity, flawed, distractible, and suffering, mitigate
heavily against the possibility of our achieving that goal in this life, on
this planet. It would greatly improve our odds of success were we to more
closely align our project with the actual facts of our nature and recast it as
the ongoing attempt to model a more tolerable, more effective purgatory.
As
individuals we are no longer creating our future, rather we are being swept
into it, often against our will.
Reality
check: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect
Union, and how’s that going anyway?
establish Justice, maybe we ought to
agree on definitions first insure domestic Tranquility, anyone paying attention to the news?
provide for the common defence, against
whom or what no one seems to know anymore promote the general Welfare, not so general these days and secure the
Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, mostly to ourselves, and Devil take the hindmost do ordain and
establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” (Seems like after more than two hundred
years we ought to be farther along.)
What
we call art is God’s narcissism expressed through the perceptions of His prime
creation. All the other usurpations of the word are simply one form or another
of advertising.
Life
goes on until it doesn’t, after which it continues.
Keep
an open mind, they told me…an open mind, then a prerequisite for education
become now an open invitation…to stupidity, to lunacy, to pathology, to a world
unhinged. No. Nor will I take action beyond the tending to my own estate. I
secure the synapses that lend architecture to my thought, firm up the pathways
axon to dendrite. I shake the dust from my shoes. I lock the gates and turn my
back.
I
can no longer fit my mind into the frame the world around me provides. It is a
matter of being, not a matter of opinion. The contrasts are too strong, the
contradictions too unsupportable. I move yet along the same path upon which I
set out so very long ago, confident then of the destination despite the
unmapped rigors of the terrain and youthfully sure of the strength to clamber
over the inevitable rubble, to slog through the ensnaring undergrowth.
Often
in disputation it becomes clear to me that there is no form of argument,
however rational, however elegant, sufficient to persuade a contrary opinion.
Some minds are simply and resolutely made up. In such instances I turn my
attention to limiting as best I can the larger consequences of their stupidity.
There is no other moral choice available to me.
Everything
in our lives constellates around two fundamental questions, which are perhaps
the first we formulate in our thinking infancy, “Where are we going?” and “Are
we there yet?” (Note: “Where did we come from?” marks a developmental advance
and thus comes later.)
As
an American, and therefore by definition a free being, I can conceive of no
greater calamity than the loss in any degree of any freedom that I arrogate to
myself, excepting those I willingly surrender.
Anyone
who believes that gender is a matter of choice could as easily be convinced
that gravity is as well.
From
my youth my understanding of history as I was living within it was that it
described a world in process of throwing the baby out with the bath. I
understood that the bath was necessary. I wanted to catch the baby.
“We
used to have art, then we traded it for the movies. Maybe not such a good deal.
When I was a boy and I read a book, it gave me the story but I had to provide
the pictures myself. That’s what my imagination was for. I owned it and I
controlled it. It was the point of contact between me and the author, a one to
one relationship. Same for painting. There the painter gave me the picture, a
product of his unique vision, and if I wanted whatever story there might be, actual
or potential, certain or speculative, I had to make the effort to discover or
to provide it. The movies gave us both at once and in the process usurped our
individual imaginations and replaced them with a corporate imagination, fixed
and unyielding. The story was the story as they read it for me, not as I read
it, the pictures were the pictures they saw, not the pictures I saw or might
have seen. I sometimes wonder if there might not be a sort of crime against
humanity here.” ~ A. Burnbridge, in conversation.
If
a thought isn’t hard won, it’s unworthy of aspiring to truth. I judge veracity
by the pain its acquisition entails and the mercy its attainment requires.
“Just
try to land on your feet,” my father always told me. “There’s no way round
getting spun up now and then, so just try to land on your feet. There isn’t any
other way really.” Well, the world has spun me three times round up and over
more than once, but I’ve always managed to land on my feet, always...broke my
legs once or twice, but I always landed on my feet.
Virtue
is the energy that makes possible the manipulation of time. Burnbridge
Axiom Number 14.
What
we call popular culture is the attempt to cast the language of truth in the
vernacular; unfortunately, the vernacular is inadequate to the task. Burnbridge
Axiom Number 11.
“When
I was young and went to my mother for an explanation of some injustice that I
perceived in the world and asked how I was to accommodate it, she often told
me, “Don’t spend too much time worrying about it. It all comes out in the
wash.” It was only as I grew older that I came to realize that what she failed
to say --- wisely --- was that, as far as my own soul was concerned, it was up
to me to do the laundry.” ~ A.
Burnbridge, in conversation.
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