It has a remarkable “cross-section” effect: a number of songs are strikingly reminiscent of older albums. Track 2, “Miracle Drug,” sounds like it could have appeared on The Unforgettable Fire, and I’ll be durned if “Love and Peace or Else” doesn’t resemble “Bullet the Blue Sky” from The Joshua Tree. Now it needs to be said that it is likely that these are inferior versions of the songs they evoke (certainly “Love and Peace of Else” is not the equal of “Bullet the Blue Sky,” though its novelty and the latter’s ubiquity on FM radio go some distance toward effacing this), but it is something impressive that this band has the ability to authentically imitate their own sound from fifteen or twenty years ago. I’m not talking about merely reworking old songs, but actually capturing the feel of an old album and a great album. Even “City of Blinding Lights” has a sturdy touch of Achtung Baby! in it, though it is refined and shorn of the characteristic Achtung background clamor — as if U2 were saying, we cannot intimate that innovation and we won’t even try.

One hesitates to prejudge (for of all great bands, U2 is in my opinion the one most deserving of repeated and concerted listening), but it is hard to imagine that a couple of these tracks will ever rise in my mind above mediocrity. “Crumbs from Your Table,” and “Original of the Species” will prove, I fear, just easily forgotten songs. Yet there are, out of eleven tracks, seven or eight “keepers.”

I wonder what the consensus about this disc will be. U2 has had a strange ride. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, they were beloved by serious fans and dilettantes alike — and critics contended earnestly, though unresolutely, over whether The Joshua Tree (1987) or Achtung Baby! (1991) was the greatest rock album ever made. But in the middle of the ‘90s, with Zooropa (1993) and Pop, (1997) the dilettantes largely abandoned them, and indeed many serious fans threw in the towel — only to return with All That You Can’t Leave Behind (2000) and the subsequent Elevation Tour. How will this album be received? I know that I have several readers in the serious-fans-who-abandoned-U2 category; and I am certain that there are many U2 dilettantes out there. What say you?

UPDATE: My father writes to submit his nominees for Best Rock Album Ever: “L.A. Woman, The Doors (my personal favorite); Who’s Next, The Who; Between the Buttons, The Rolling Stones; The Buddy Holly; and Cosmo’s Factory, Creedence Clearwater Revival.”

UPDATE II: I should have mentioned the final track on How To Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, “Yahweh.” A fine, crisp, beautiful song, contributing to the striking fact that U2 has finished its last three albums (four, if you count the Johnny Cash collaboration on Zooropa “The Wanderer”) with a song that is in essence a prayer.

[W]hat I actually believe is that while public opinion may be against legalized polyamory, common sense and justice itself are strongly in its favour insofar as they are in favour of same-sex marriage. My actual feeling about same-sex marriage is indistinct bordering on coy — but put yourself in the position of an aspiring polygamist. You can snicker all you like, but these are real people backed by all the crushing weight our society gives to multiculturalism. What are you going to tell Mr. Issaka or Mr. al-Saud when he asks why the recently-invented demands of gays and lesbians for certified nontraditional couplings were met with dizzying speed, but his desire to build a tripling or a quadrupling that is traditional and even sacred to him cannot be addressed? [. . .]

I am not depending so much on the “activist nature” of the [Canadian] Court here as on its vulnerability to a minority backed by deductive logic. How the heck do you think we got gay marriage in the first place? Even its supporters would have to admit that it wasn't the product of a careful assessment of the social-science evidence — gay marriage being so new that there isn't much evidence about. [. . .]

[Y]es, it is a crime to enter formally into a new polygamous family relationship on Canadian soil — for the moment — but polygamous matrimonial relationships concluded outside Canada are already recognized as valid under, at the very least, the law of Ontario. (You'll want to check s.1(2) of your Family Law Act.) The tension between this proviso and the Criminal Code is exactly the sort of oddity that minorities have been using to explode retrograde social norms in the Western world for 150 years or more.

And, of course, supporters of polygamy are already — for better or worse, but certainly wisely — following the strategy of gays and lesbians; first make it legal, then make it equal. Ontario Muslims are fighting to establish the principle that their communities can make family law for themselves contractually, within a traditionalist Muslim framework under sharia. Legal polygamy may or may not be a direct result of the ongoing struggle, but either way I'm not confident that the criminal law can stand up to a good shove from a hard case.

Now that is good stuff. Have I mentioned that Mr. Cosh is one of the better writers around?

[White’s] obituaries aver that his image was “tarnished” by an awkward 1998 speech that killed his budding TV career. But his “stereotyping” of the races was little more than a statement of the Solzhenitsyn position on the existence of human varieties--i.e., that it's, on balance, a good thing that they exist. And how exactly does one challenge his description of homosexuality as “one of the biggest sins in the Bible”? I don't hold with that book myself, but its language about various abominations isn't especially ambiguous, and despite White’s aggressive faith I can't help thinking of him as a nicer guy than L. T. No black American's image was ever “tarnished” by rapping about murdering gays, as opposed to merely describing them as sinful. One is tempted to suggest that these obits, in standing up for “diversity” by reproducing the blot on White's copybook, are implicitly bashing a black man for daring to speak out loud without a drum track.

(By the way, Mr. Millman has a whole mass of new posts up on his blog — almost like a new issue of a good magazine.)

Jesting aside, that a man so accomplished in failure would be deemed by the President worthy of this honor does not speak well for the latter’s judgment. In my view, Mr. Tenet should have resigned on September 12, 2001, along with a half dozen other public officials — not on account of some discrete error or miscalculation, but simply in acknowledgement of the magnitude of the catastrophe that they presided over. Their jobs were held on public trust; resignations would have demonstrated that that trust still meant something. A healthy Republic would have given the officials a week or so to resign on their own terms; then, if resignations were not forthcoming, her duly elected representatives would have solemnly drawn up articles of impeachment against them, thus demonstrating the seriousness with which We the People of the United States approach such matters.

But seriousness has departed us, though most of its many impostors remain. (And let it be remembered what Chesterton said of seriousness: Funny is not the opposite of serious; it is opposite of unfunny.)

For some reason (as the Mencken quotation below suggests, my sympathy for bureaucrats is less than fulsome at the moment) I am reminded of the recommendations that Jean-Jacques Rousseau offered, in his unjustly neglected The Government of Poland, to the Poles concerning their ancient tradition known as the liberum veto. Now the veto, an infamous and absurd device to most eighteenth century reformers, gave to any member of the Polish legislature the privilege of shutting down any debate or deliberation that displeased him, and dissolving the legislature itself: A single vote would shut down the legislative body of the nation — just like that. Intriguingly, Rousseau does not — as we who know Rousseau as a radical reformer would expect — recommend abolition of the supposedly barbaric device. Indeed he counsels the Poles only to narrow its scope a bit, and then give it real teeth.

Rousseau begins by declaring simply: “The liberum veto is not in itself a pernicious right,” but it has been corrupted and abused. The accretions and corruptions must be cleared, but the right itself should remain. It “would be less absurd if it applied only to the basic principles of the constitution; but that it should be used indiscriminately in all proceedings of the diet is absolutely inadmissible.”

Rousseau’s shrewdness in laying out the following argument is a thing to behold.

The basic points to be established as fundamental laws should be carefully weighed and considered; and these points only should be subject to the liberum veto. This will make the constitution as firm and the laws as irrevocable as possible. For it is contrary to the nature of the body politic to be subject to irrevocable laws; but it is contrary neither to nature nor to reason to require that they should be revoked only with the same formalities that brought them into being. That is the only chain with which we can bind the future. This will suffice both to strengthen the constitution, and to satisfy the Poles in their love of the liberum veto, without exposing them to the evil consequences to which it has given rise. [. . .]

In a state like Poland, where there is still a great deal of spiritual vitality, it might have been possible to preserve the admirable right of the liberum veto in its entirety without much danger, and perhaps even with profit, if the use of that right had been made dangerous and attended by serious consequences for the user. For surely it is inconceivable for anyone who thus prevents the diet from acting, and leaves the state without means of action, to go quietly home and enjoy with impunity the public desolation he has caused.

In the case of a nearly unanimous resolution, therefore, if a single opponent retained the right of veto, I should want him to answer for it with his life, not only to his constituents in the subsequent dietine, but thereafter to the whole of the nation whose misfortune he had been. I should like the law to prescribe that, six months after his negative vote, he should be solemnly tried by an extraordinary court expressly constituted to consider the case, made up of the wisest, most respectable and most illustrious men of the nation; and this court would not be allowed merely to declare him guilty or not guilty, but would have either to condemn him to death without hope of pardon, or to award him compensation and public honours for life, without ever being able to adopt any mean between these two extremes.

Thrilling, isn’t it? Here was a man who thought the health of a republic a problem worthy of concentrated attention. Whatever we may think of Rousseau, there is no question in my mind that he can teach us something about patriotism.

Now it goes without saying that I do not wish to propose death for Mr. Tenet. But I do mean to propose that our seriousness on questions such as these — public honor and shame, patriotism and duty — is sorely lacking. Tenet has received our highest public honor — but note well who has bestowed it upon him. Surely not the people themselves. Note well, further, that it was precisely without the kind of republican solemnity which Rousseau recommends that this honor has been accorded. The administration, in effect, gave our highest honor it to itself.

The whole thing has about it, frankly, the whiff of a decayed monarchy: the grand preposterousness of Versailles, the machinations of courtiers so distant from the people that their rituals are looked on with blank disbelief, cynical amusement and finally contempt. One can almost imagine the sensible and good-natured man out in Middle America opening his morning paper to read of George Tenet receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom (for “efforts” that “have made our country more secure and advanced the cause of human liberty”), and bursting into that laughter which only the charlatans of Washington, D. C., can produce.

The advantages of this plan, I believe, are too patent to need argument. At one stroke it removes all the legal impediments which now make the punishment of a recreant jobholder so hopeless a process, and enormously widens the range of possible penalties. They are now stiff and, in large measure, illogical; under the system I propose they could be made to fit the crime precisely. Say a citizen today becomes convinced that a certain judge is a jackass — that his legal learning is defective, his sense of justice atrophied, and his conduct of cases before him tyrannical and against decency. As things stand, it is impossible to do anything about it. A judge cannot be impeached on the mere ground that he is a jackass; the process is far too costly and cumbersome, and there are too many judges liable to the charge. Nor is anything to be gained from denouncing him publicly and urging all good citizens to vote against him when he comes up for re-election, for his term may run for ten or fifteen years, and even if it expires tomorrow and he is defeated the chances are good that his successor will be quite as bad, and maybe even worse. Moreover, if he is a Federal judge he never comes up for re-election at all, for once he has been appointed by the President of the United States, on the advice of his more influential clients and with the consent of their agents in the Senate, he is safe until he is so far gone in senility that he has to be propped up on the bench with pillows.

But now imagine any citizen free to approach him in open court and pull his nose. Or even, in aggravated cases, to cut off his ears, throw him out of the window, or knock him in the head with an axe. How vastly more attentive he would be to his duties! How diligently he would apply himself to the study of the law! How careful he would be about the rights of litigants before him! How polite and suave he would become! For judges, like all the rest of us, are vain fellows: they do not enjoy having their noses pulled. The ignominy resident in the operation would not be abated by the subsequent trial of the puller, even if he should be convicted and jailed. The fact would still be brilliantly remembered that at least one citizen had deemed the judge sufficiently a malefactor to punish him publicly, and to risk going to jail for it. A dozen such episodes, and the career of any judge would be ruined and his heart broken, even though the jails bulged with his critics. He could not maintain his air of aloof dignity on the bench; even his catchpolls would snicker at him behind their hands, especially if he showed a cauliflower ear, a black eye or a scar over his bald head. Moreover, soon or late some citizen who had at him would be acquitted by a petit jury, and then, obviously, he would have to retire. It might be provided by law, indeed, that he should be compelled to retire in that case — that an acquittal would automatically vacate the office of the offending jobholder.

In a letter in The Habit of Being [Flannery O’Connor] recalls reading St. Thomas late at night and her mother asking her to turn off the light. O’Connor “with lifted finger and broad bland beatific expression would reply, ‘on the contrary, I answer that the light being eternal and limitless, cannot be turned off. Shut your eyes.’”
— Benjamin B. Alexander, “A Difficult Portrait of the Artist.”

For Christians our proper end or goal is communion with God. Thus our highest art portrays the struggle for that communion, thereby shaping our culture in terms of this struggle. This is not hypocrisy, but the nature of social life.

The kind of culture in which we live can make communion with God easier or more difficult to attain. Each of us is blessed with free will but, human nature being frail, more of those living in a religiously grounded community will choose God than will those living in a truly secularized society. This is, after all, why secularists want to empty the public square — to lessen the “social pressure” to recognize the call of faith.
— Bruce Frohnen, “The Passion’s Severe Mercy.”

Here is Mr. Charles Moore’s very admirable but, I fear, somewhat confused column about the looming possibility in Britain of a law against religious hatred which, as everyone is coming to realize, will likely prove to be a law privileging Muslims and silencing their critics. In short, an astounding surrender to p.c. conventions in the face of a real threat.

There is a huge and important question behind all this — indeed, several huge and important questions — which I cannot give but a brief and sketchy treatment here. And even this treatment will require me to say things that even sympathetic readers will not take kindly to. As a character in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings puts it, alas that these evil days should be ours. But these things cannot be helped: for the questions go to the very heart of who we are as a people, and touch on the question of whether this nation that we have built here shall endure.

First, we must reflect deeper on the always tricky problem of Free Speech*. The best I can come at the moment to articulating the problem is to say bluntly that speech is not free. It never has been and it never will. Every society lives by an orthodoxy, the traducement of which will bring punishment upon the traducer. There are those to reject the idea of orthodoxies with great truculence — but this rejection is only a very distinctive feature of their orthodoxy.

While it is true that here in America the presumption** has been in favor of free speech, this has never been absolute, despite what so many among our intelligentsia say about the First Amendment (an Amendment which, it should be recalled, as it was written binds only Congress, and which, whatever has subsequently been coaxed from it by way of extravagant interpretation, is still contained within a larger document.) What has limited it is our commitment as a people to the principle of self-government. Hamilton makes this point in an indirect way when he takes up the objection to the Federal Constitution of its lack of protection for the free press: “What is the liberty of the press?” he inquires. “Who can give it any definition which would not leave the utmost latitude for evasion? I hold it to be impracticable; and from this I infer, that its security, whatever fine declarations may be inserted in any constitution respecting it, must altogether depend on public opinion, and on the general spirit of the people and of the government.” (Federalist No. 84) Madison is getting at the same thing when he disparages the adoption of “parchment barriers” against the abridgement of rights. Questions of specific liberties, in other words, are subsumed into the larger question of self-government.

Secondly, we must reflect on this problem — the problem of Free Speech — in the context of a question that no one wants to ask, much less answer. It is a hard question, but we mustn’t avoid it, or pretend it is not a real question. Nor can we simply denounce as bigots anyone who entertains the question publicly. Perhaps, having taken up and considered the question, we will in the end answer as most of our Liberals (and many of our Conservatives) would so dearly like us to: or perhaps we will not. But we must take up the question in earnest, in a manner befitting of a free people which has faced and surmounted hard questions before. The question is this: Is Islam compatible with the American tradition of politics? I for one will not have that question closed before it is even examined.

A similar question faced us with regard to Communism; and, by and large, after some very fierce public debate, Americans answered No. Communism, we concluded back then, is not compatible with American politics. Having concluded thusly, we proceeded to do what follows logically, for a self-governing people, from that conclusion: we moved to proscribe Communism as an organized force in America. We did what we had to in order to place upon anyone loyal to Communism — loyal enough to betray, or countenance the betrayal of his country — burdens sufficient to truss and emasculate the Communist enterprise here in America. That was a wise decision: the Communist enterprise murdered more people, in a shorter amount of time, than any other force in human history — and no amount of vituperation against “McCarthyism” will change my mind about it.

Now — and here we get into even more sensitive issues — it is important to note that with Islam, as with Communism, what we are considering here is not so much freedom of speech as freedom of thought (there: I said it) — the freedom to hold certain opinions without being subject to certain impairments, inconveniences, and irritations, most of them a matter of social pressures but some — yes, some — a matter of law. In both cases, that of Communism and that of Islam, the opinion that falls (or may fall) under this proscription amounts to the following: The government of the United States of America should be violently overthrown and replaced by another. Here is an opinion we will not tolerate, and that is that.

Some readers — especially those of the libertarian persuasion — will have a hard time with the idea of intermediate measures. They will think that intolerance of certain opinions leads directly to horrible things. Their rhetoric will escalate before their intellect has really taken an appraisal of the situation. All we can say to them, is that they are of little faith — little faith in the ideals of self-government by which the people of this country set themselves apart from the rest of the world.

I am well aware that all this rings fiercely discordant to ears used to being massaged incessantly by Liberalism’s platitudes; but these are no less pressing issues for us, because they make us uncomfortable.

_______
* Anyone who does not consider it a problem is simply not thinking seriously enough, both historically and philosophically.
** Only, mind you, a presumption: see 1. Alien and Sedition Acts, 2. loyal oaths, 3. Hatch and Smith Acts.

I will be brief. The political philosophy of this country, conveniently articulated in our great public documents, teaches that we Americans, as a people, have committed ourselves to certain way of answering great public questions. We will not shirk them. We have no illusions about the historical fact that all societies face great public questions, and must finally answer them or cease being societies. Understanding this, we do not set ourselves against change qua change, but we do emphatically pledge ourselves to a way of changing — or not changing. This, mind you, is not an obsession with mere process. For the process in question is in fact the process of self-government. As Publius puts it in Federalist #71, “The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern.”**

The American political tradition, our political tradition, holds that, even if the State has the authority to transform the institution of marriage (which it did not create), it cannot undertake this innovation except through mechanisms which decisively reveal, for all to see, that a consensus of We the People (us the people for you grammarians) has developed and matured. To change the public institution of marriage is to legislate; it is a very profound act of legislation, answering publicly a very emotional and momentous public question. The question must be answered by We the People. It must go through legislative assemblies of the people’s representatives, or we cannot continue to call ourselves a self-governing people. This innovation, if it happens, must not be an act of usurpation by a factional minority of judges, but of republican consensus. More: the consensus itself must not consist of a bare majority, or a mere plurality, but instead reflect the “deliberate sense of the community.” Still more: even a solid majority, if it is achieved, must be able to pull along in acquiescence most of its opponents. We are not crude majoritarians, though we are republicans. When issues of enormous importance come before us, we debate them, in parliamentary assemblies comprised of men and women who have been entrusted by the people with legislative authority — and, by that very republican principle of which Publius speaks, in parliamentary assemblies that are, of all the branches of government, closest to the people. That is how republics work. We do not stand by idly and let robed attorneys proclaim a judicial despotism. The courts will not be our Legislator if we are to remain a free people.

As it happens, there are several legitimate mechanisms by which the proponents of homosexual marriage might accomplish their innovation. We have the Constitutional amendment process. Failing that, proponents can turn to the state legislatures or to Congress itself. But for this to be accomplished through the action of the least representative, the least accountable and the least flexible branch of government, against the considered opinion of the majority of We the People, and against laws duly-enacted in our august republican bodies (and indeed, as with the late election, against laws duly-enacted by the people themselves), would comprise an act of usurpation without parallel.

Mr. Hayes, for all his reasonableness, has failed to address the specter of what some have aptly called “the judicial usurpation of politics.” What is at stake here is not merely the question of homosexual marriage; it is the question of the nature America as a people and a nation. It is, in short, the question of whether we will continue to be a self-governing republic, or decay into a judicial despotism.

_______
* Do not let this very brief summary deter you from reading his whole exposition: it is worth the time and effort.
** Govern, that is, through elected representatives.

First (and this a difficult irony to express properly), Chesterton in this case was writing essentially as a man of the Left. Distributism was a posture of opposition to capitalism, and indeed Chesterton reserved some of his fiercest polemics for industrialists and millionaires. He wrote, for example, a series of articles for a socialist paper that would make a good Republican’s blood boil today. But Chesterton, writing in 1925 a man of the Left, to our eyes scores so many blows against the Left that it is difficult to think of him as anything but a Conservative; indeed, a reactionary, for his arguments will assuredly not sit well with our right-wingers of today. If one were to imagine the typical American lefty and the typical American righty reading this essay, one would picture them both reacting with settled irritation.

For Chesterton is writing against birth control, and he is pulling no punches. And the fact that his arguments — not, to be sure, because of any confusion or internal disorder on his part (for Chesterton is a sharp as ever) — reduce our familiar ideological markers to a muddle, is simply evidence that he has, characteristically, transcended politics. He has brought us closer to the nature of political things, and shown us with greater clarity the destiny of our civilization. Such a concentration of mind is sure to discomfit.

For Chesterton, birth control was emphatically a thing derived from capitalism, and the ascendance of capitalism as a guiding principle:

There is a third, reason for my contempt [for birth control], much deeper and therefore much more difficult to express; in which is rooted all my reasons for being anything I am or attempt to be; and above all, for being a Distributist. Perhaps the nearest to a description of it is to say this: that my contempt boils over into bad behaviour when I hear the common suggestion that a birth is avoided because people want to be “free” to go to the cinema or buy a gramophone or a loud-speaker. What makes me want to walk over such people like doormats is that they use the word “free.” By every act of that sort they chain themselves to the most servile and mechanical system yet tolerated by men. The cinema is a machine for unrolling certain regular patterns called pictures; expressing the most vulgar millionaires’ notion of the taste of the most vulgar millions. The gramophone is a machine for recording such tunes as certain shops and other organisations choose to sell. The wireless is better; but even that is marked by the modern mark of all three; the impotence of the receptive party. The amateur cannot challenge the actor; the householder will find it vain to go and shout into the gramophone; the mob cannot pelt the modern speaker, especially when he is a loud-speaker. It is all a central mechanism giving out to men exactly what their masters think they should have.

But it is Chesterton’s second reason for contempt for birth control that reveals his remarkable prescience. I would like the reader to keep the Groningen Protocol in Holland — the protocol, that is, for euthanizing infants — in mind as he reads these words:

Second, I despise Birth-Control because it is a weak and wobbly and cowardly thing. It is not even a step along the muddy road they call Eugenics; it is a flat refusal to take the first and most obvious step along the road of Eugenics. Once grant that their philosophy is right, and their course of action is obvious; and they dare not take it; they dare not even declare it. If there is no authority in things which Christendom has called moral, because their origins were mystical, then they are clearly free to ignore all difference between animals and men; and treat men as we treat animals. They need not palter with the stale and timid compromise and convention called Birth-Control. Nobody applies it to the cat. The obvious course for Eugenists is to act towards babies as they act towards kittens. Let all the babies be born and then let us drown those we do not like. I cannot see any objection to it; except the moral or mystical sort of objection that we advance against Birth-Prevention. And that would be real and even reasonable Eugenics; for we could then select the best, or at least the healthiest, and sacrifice what are called the unfit. By the weak compromise of Birth-Prevention, we are very probably sacrificing the fit and only producing the unfit. The births we prevent may be the births of the best and most beautiful children; those we allow, the weakest or worst. Indeed, it is probable; for the habit discourages the early parentage of young and vigorous people; and lets them put off the experience to later years, mostly from mercenary motives. Until I see a real pioneer and progressive leader coming out with a good, bold, scientific programme for drowning babies, I will not join the movement.

The program has arrived, Mr. Chesterton. Indeed, it has nearly triumphed, and conquered outright in many precincts.

Under the Groningen protocol, if doctors at the hospital think a child is suffering unbearably from a terminal condition, they have the authority to end the child’s life. The protocol is likely to be used primarily for newborns, but it covers any child up to age 12.

Now my point here is not to draw out the long, dirty road that led us from birth control* to the lawful execution of infants; it is, rather, to show that its lineaments at least were discerned and censured by the more perceptive of those who bore witness to its origins — among them G. K. Chesterton. My point, moreover, is to suggest, by way of the muddle Chesterton makes of our comfortable ideological framework, how far the poison has penetrated.

But Chesterton does not leave the matter at that. He concludes instead with a strange and stirring challenge: Stirring because any man who knows of what he speaks will not fail to be stirred to very his soul, and strange because so remote, like the distant sound of a trumpet, calling back to battle men who have grown soft with luxury and debasement — calling back by the words of the Apostle: O Death, where is thy victory; O Death, where is thy sting?

Now a child is the very sign and sacrament of personal freedom. He is a fresh free will added to the wills of the world; he is something that his parents have freely chosen to produce and which they freely agree to protect. They can feel that any amusement he gives (which is often considerable) really comes from him and from them, and from nobody else. He has been born without the intervention of any master or lord. He is a creation and a contribution; he is their own creative contribution to creation. He is also a much more beautiful, wonderful, amusing and astonishing thing than any of the stale stories or jingling jazz tunes turned out by the machines. When men no longer feel that he is so, they have lost the appreciation of primary things, and therefore all sense of proportion about the world. People who prefer the mechanical pleasures, to such a miracle, are jaded and enslaved. They are preferring the very dregs of life to the first fountains of life. They are preferring the last, crooked, indirect, borrowed, repeated and exhausted things of our dying Capitalist civilisation, to the reality which is the only rejuvenation of all civilisation. It is they who are hugging the chains of their old slavery; it is the child who is ready for the new world.

Today almost everyone is hugging the chains of an older slavery, and striving against the life and reality of the new world.

_______
* Conservatives who criticize (as they should) the “judicial usurpation of politics” may want to note that the usurpation really began to pick up steam when the Supreme Court declared (in the infamous “emanations and penumbras” opinion) that every law against birth control, passed by duly-elected legislatures out across the several states, was unconstitutional on grounds of privacy.

[Cross-posted at RedState.]

What Science has forgotten is that it is fundamentally an instrumental entity: it does not choose its own ends. It takes orders and carries them out; it does not formulate its own. Philosophy precedes Science, and its authority over it, adjudicated through a political process, is final; thus also, of course, politics precedes Science. In practice, this means that one need not be a trained scientist to speak to its uses, and speak against its abuses. It is absurd to exclude the non-specialist from judgments about how we ought to use this instrument, just as it is absurd to restrict the driving of automobiles only to mechanics. One need not be a railroad engineer to identify a train wreck; nor to conclude that conducting a train blindfolded is criminal negligence. Yet many of our practitioners of Science declare presumptuously that none can say anything against their wild rush, because they know not how a train works. [more]

Talk about moral train wrecks: here is the first paragraph of an early comment on the piece:

What gets me is the irony that we are sooo, so reverent of [sic] human life that we worship these tiny bits of flesh, these potential humans, at the same time that we clear [the] world’s natural areas and consign the other, non-domesticated classes of creatures to extinction by habitat loss.

Good grief.