MaybeToday.org

So, a majority of people in the country, at least according to this poll, want somebody else to pay for the looming health care program – you know, like those rich people,  who are most likely rich because they’re cheats, anyway. Why am I not surprised? Isn’t this just the perfect embodiment – and inevitable end-result – of modernism’s rejection of personal responsibility in favor of paternalistic political super-structures? I suppose I exaggerate though; the actual end-results of these left wing muggings of the rich have not infrequently climaxed with their murder, not their robbery – but we’re more moral than that in this country, right?

The welfare state may start out with the intention of protecting the weak from their inability to compete successfully, but without a solid and explicit grounding in virtue, it ends up inculcating widespread irresponsibility, and finding itself having to resort to thievery to survive. How is it that we haven’t learned this yet? To those who do not look too deeply at the means being employed, confiscatory tax policies might give the appearance of achieving social justice, but they are driven by a politics of envy, systematically breaking down the bonds of communal charity, through both the embittering of the few through the violation of their property rights, and even more so in the coarsening of the many, whose capacity for gratefulness, goodwill, and even civic responsibility, is undermined by an ethic of entitlement and usurpation. If the means you employ are criminal (like, stealing), your results will not be just, regardless of what you choose to call them.

Given the opportunity, and enough easy living to break down the backbone of self-discipline, the reality is that way too many people will not only sign up for a free lunch, but will order the filet if it’s on the menu. The problem is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and those who advertise it as such are either knaves or fools. Of course, once they’ve targeted whom they will coerce the payment from, there’s no longer a lot of question as to which they are.

Being “between courses” has afforded me the opportunity to dip back into Recorded Books’ Modern Scholar series of lectures on audio CD. I started listening to these a couple years ago, finding the entries by Thomas Madden to be especially worthwhile listening. Aside from Madden’s, I have to admit that I’ve found the rest of the series hit or miss, but I wanted to give a shout-out to Professor Fred E. Baumann for his entry, Visions of Utopia: Philosophy and the Perfect Society.

This might come across as a backhanded compliment, but I was impressed by the seriousness with which Baumann treated religion in this set of lectures. Not that the lectures focused on religion – religion played a small role – but he understands the importance of religion in the fabric of both intellectual and common history, and did not just simply dismiss it as irrelevant, or regard it derisively, as most modern intellectuals seem to. Not only was that refreshing, but it added a layer of realism and intellectual heft to the discussion that seems sorely lacking so often.

The lectures cover Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Bacon’s New Atlantis, Rousseau’s Social Contract, the Jacobin implementation of Rousseau’s thought, Marx’s programmatic update of Rousseau, and Skinner’s Walden Two, concluding with some reflections on the continuing relevance of utopian thought, particularly in the bizarre but socially intoxicating supra-eugenicism of the movement at the edge of “progressivism” that calls itself transhumanism.

Baumann is not a strictly conventional thinker on these matters, and I take issue with some of his opinions – especially in the way he reads Rousseau, which seems to me to unjustifiably take him off the hook for the monster he created – but I highly recommend this set of lectures as a thoughtful and engaging exposition on what only a fool would still consider a fringe aspect of political science.

Very interesting short piece linked here from the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion section yesterday by Ronald Reagan’s former chief speech writer, on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget what a dreadful threat Soviet communism posed to human freedom on many levels – not to mention world peace – and how remarkable it was that the whole odious scheme came crashing down with such a whimper.

The power of words, the power of conviction, the power of resoluteness, the power of truth… credit should be given where it is due, and along with Pope John Paul the Great, it is hard to think of anyone more responsible for the peaceful outcome of that tense conflict than the flinty Reagan. Truth be told, I’m ashamed of  how I thought of him at the time, in my youthful naivety.

Anthony R. Dolan: The Power of Reagan’s Berlin Wall Speech – WSJ.com

One of those days when the realization slaps me that we just don’t get do-overs in life…

I heard during the prayers of the faithful this morning that Tony Melchiorri had died, and was buried last week. Tony was a Natick cop for many years, and a man I came to know, after a certain fashion, during my teenage years in town. He was always a good guy.

I think it’s fair to say that Tony spent a good deal of his life trying to protect the local kids from their own stupidity – with admittedly mixed results. But thanks for trying, Tony. Rest in peace.

For the first time in almost six months, I’m not working on a college course. I finished my first pre-req course at Franciscan University over the weekend, and I’ve been enjoying the mental break of knowing I’m uncommitted (especially since receiving confirmation of my assignment submission yesterday), but there are a couple matters that have surfaced in the process.

I never expected to take anywhere near six months to complete that course, and if I can’t find a way to shave course durations significantly, I could be on this program for an unwieldy amount of time – it would be at least another three years before I began my actual graduate courses, which simply doesn’t sound workable. I need to find a way to reduce the course durations to something much closer to three months. In a world without other responsibilities, that would be a piece of cake, but I’m struggling to even imagine how I could consolidate my schoolwork like that without shirking other duties – and these courses won’t get any easier.

The other glaring matter is what to do with the website. Fronting this site with a blog has become something of a joke, as I rarely find time to write for it, and increasing my focus on schoolwork will hardly work to ameliorate that. My writing interests hardly intersect effectively with the blogging ideal, anyway, as I just can’t rouse myself to blurt and link every time I have half an idea. I want my writing to stretch my thinking out, to help move my mental acumen from intuition and cleverness to substantial and substantiated reason.

So I’m seriously considering moving the blog off to a side page (maybe with a weekly article commitment, just to keep me honest), and fronting the site with a structure geared toward publishing static content. I’m considering a series of doctrinal studies,based on my CCD class preparation notes, among other things.I could see this serving a good purpose, as a kind of semi-popularized collection of important ideas in Catholic theology, where semi-popular means presented at a level a layman (or student) can easily grasp,  while also providing the background necessary to effectively read scholarly works.