How to know less without really trying

There’s a sort of anti-wisdom in news broadcasts and the speeches of politicians, such that when you’ve listened to them you know less about The Real than you did before.  I could have consumed unreality this morning by pausing for a moment to watch President Obama lie to American Jews in his speech to AIPAC or by listening to the news liars bloviate about their religion of politics, but instead I nourished myself with The Real: I helped our 7-year-old daughter open a new gallon of milk and pour some on her cereal, and I helped clean up the spilled milk with a paper towel.

So, here is White’s Law: the more you listen to the news, the less informed you are.

Later: C.S. Lewis makes a similar point in Letter I of The Screwtape Letters:

At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning.  But what with the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that.

…

Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences.  Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it “real life” and don’t let him ask what he means by “real”.

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the babies

Ever notice how with these people, their response to “potential personhood” is always to kill the potential person? On our side, the proper response to a person is love. If there were such a thing as potential personhood, which there isn’t, the proper response would still be love just in case the potential person were to become a real person.

The notion that the proper response to a person is love is the “personalistic norm”—see Karol Wojtyła’s Love and Responsibility, Ignatius Press, 1993, page 41.

Hat tip: W4.

I think I’m back

I’ve been delving into the innards of wordpress so I’ll head back here and do some wordpressy stuff. Meanwhile, the Liberry of Congress has been putting old WPA posters online.

Playing with tumblr

summaminutiae.tumblr.com – my poor blog is one of St Benedict’s gyrovagues:

The fourth kind of monks are those called Gyrovagues.
These spend their whole lives tramping from province to province,
staying as guests in different monasteries
for three or four days at a time.
Always on the move, with no stability,
they indulge their own wills
and succumb to the allurements of gluttony,
and are in every way worse than the Sarabaites.
Of the miserable conduct of all such
it is better to be silent than to speak.

Why is my bookbag/ereader so heavy?

I found Calibre, a free ebook reader for ubuntu, so I’m in the ebook market now. My first ebook is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. His prose is as spare as the story’s blasted and bitter landscape but it’s also unexpectedly lively with a flair for the unusual but perfect word. I’ve considered how I would write the same story, and I find myself bringing out piles of words to make explicit what McCarthy tells slyly without words at all. Every paragraph of his is a poem.

My other current book, a real paper-and-ink book, is The Heart of Newman, a 1920s synthesis of Newman’s writings arranged by the Jesuit Erich Przywara. Newman’s works are vast and this provides an enjoyable path through them with unexpected delights around every corner.

The consummate writer, the brilliant friend

This human life

Ian McEwan gives us an account of the final days of Christopher Hitchens, “the consummate writer, the brilliant friend”.

Jeff Culbreath gives us John Henry Newman on the virtues of a gentleman. These qualities are commonplaces in the little farm towns of central Illinois.

Benedictine abbess Hildegard of Bingen will be named a doctor of the Church; here’s a bibliography.

Films

Kathy Shaidle reviews John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film Seconds.

Architecture

Hilary White takes a look at nihilist architecture and gives us the Adam Smith Institute and Roger Scruton on the same.

Letters

George Orwell examines the perversions of Salvador Dali.

Edward Gibbon shares his method of studying Latin and Greek, via the Laudator.

Photography

Soviet Moscow in the 1970s and 1980s.

Technicalities

Here’s how to link to a particular moment in a youtube video. In a nutshell, append #t=7m14s to the url to start the video at 7 minutes 14 seconds.

The poor of Jesus Christ

Hilaire Belloc has words for government food banks that give poor food to poor people:

Almighty God, whose justice like a sun
Shall coruscate along the floors of Heaven,
Raising what’s low, perfecting what’s undone,
Breaking the proud and making odd things even.
The poor of Jesus Christ along the street
In your rain sodden, in your snows unshod,
They have nor hearth, nor sword, nor human meat,
Nor even the bread of men : Almighty God.

The poor of Jesus Christ whom no man hears
Have waited on your vengeance much too long.
Wipe out not tears but blood : our eyes bleed tears.
Come, smite our damned sophistries so strong
That thy rude hammer battering this rude wrong
Ring down the abyss of twice ten thousand years.

Current reading

I was going to re-read de Waal’s Seeking God: The Way of St Benedict, but I got sidetracked when my copy of Praying the Bible: An Introduction to Lectio Divina suddenly turned up one day.  It’s filled to the brim with references to the fathers and their remarkable, even astounding, praise of the Bible.

Excellent essay quotes

Last Friday the two oldest kids, 14 and 12, turned in essays about the characters in the Iliad for their Ancient Literature course.  Today their teacher, Megan Krejci, highlighted bits from their essays in this blog post:

Christopher, 14:

“If not for being angry, selfish, and spiteful, Achilles could be like Hector.”

Sarah, 12:

“Akhilleus has some similarities with Gilgamesh; he is part god and part human, has a best friend who dies, and goes to his mother when he has a problem.”

Esther de Waal

Here’s a recent interview with Esther de Waal, the author of Seeking God: The Way of St Benedict, one of my current books.

There are places for all the activities of the monastery, and at the heart of the great complex of buildings, in the very center—how audacious—they put empty space. The empty space is a garden, grass, flowers in very simple colors, white and blue, and at the very heart a fountain, a spring of living water.  Compare that to a human being: We have all the demands and the various activities, earning your living, making decisions, hospitality, maintaining property, all the rest of it. And in the center, Christ is empty, uncluttered space. Around Christ is the busy walkway servicing the needs of daily life, but in the middle you can refresh yourself in the spring of living water.

Trojan War propaganda

Just had a great hour-long conversation with the 2 older kids about the characters in the Iliad and how Homer goes against the traditions of war propaganda to recognize nobility in enemy characters (the Trojans) and evil in the characters on the side of him and his listeners (the Greeks). If the kids have enough time, I’m hoping they can come up with some modern propaganda-style posters for the Trojan War, illustrating how a Greek propagandist might lie about Priam and Hektor to portray them as evil, or how a Trojan propagandist might play up the bad sides of Odysseus or Akhilleus or Agamemnon.

What’s amazing is how Homer gave us such perfectly-realized human characters and relationships. The kids are excited and we could easily go on about them all day.

Speaking of which, here are some garish WW2 propaganda posters.  I wonder who will write the Iliad of our “war against terror”?