The “ears of the heart”

Regio Dissimilitudinis....

"...For Benedict, [St Benedict of Nursia] the words of the Psalm: coram angelis psallam Tibi, Domine – in the presence of the angels, I will sing your praise (cf. 138:1) – are the decisive rule governing the prayer and chant of the monks. What this expresses is the awareness that in communal prayer one is singing in the presence of the entire heavenly court, and is thereby measured according to the very highest standards: that one is praying and singing in such a way as to harmonize with the music of the noble spirits who were considered the originators of the harmony of the cosmos, the music of the spheres.

From this perspective one can understand the seriousness of a remark by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who used an expression from the Platonic tradition handed down by Augustine, to pass judgement on the poor singing of monks, which for him was evidently very far from being a mishap of only minor importance. He describes the confusion resulting from a poorly executed chant as a falling into the “zone of dissimilarity” – the regio dissimilitudinis. Augustine had borrowed this phrase from Platonic philosophy, in order to designate his condition prior to conversion (cf. Confessions, VII, 10.16): man, who is created in God’s likeness, falls in his godforsakenness into the “zone of dissimilarity” – into a remoteness from God, in which he no longer reflects him, and so has become dissimilar not only to God, but to himself, to what being human truly is. Bernard is certainly putting it strongly when he uses this phrase, which indicates man’s falling away from himself, to describe bad singing by monks. But it shows how seriously he viewed the matter. It shows that the culture of singing is also the culture of being, and that the monks have to pray and sing in a manner commensurate with the grandeur of the word handed down to them, with its claim on true beauty.

This intrinsic requirement of speaking with God and singing of him with words he himself has given, is what gave rise to the great tradition of Western music. It was not a form of private “creativity”, in which the individual leaves a memorial to himself and makes self-representation his essential criterion. Rather it is about vigilantly recognizing with the “ears of the heart” the inner laws of the music of creation, the archetypes of music that the Creator built into his world and into men, and thus discovering music that is worthy of God, and at the same time truly worthy of man, music whose worthiness resounds in purity."

From "The Origins of Western Theology and the Roots of European Culture," address to Representatives from the World of Culture, Sep 12, 2008

Things could be tons worse here... Three cheers for political inaction... and fracking!

Lawrence Solomon: Green power failure | Climate Realists:

.Global-warming-related catastrophes are increasingly hitting vulnerable populations around the world, with one species in particular danger: the electricity ratepayer. In Canada, in the U.K., in Spain, in Denmark, in Germany and elsewhere the danger to ratepayers is especially great, but ratepayers in one country — the U.S. — seem to have weathered the worst of the disaster.

America’s secret? Unlike leaders in other countries, which to their countries’ ruin adopted policies as if global warming mattered, U.S. leaders more paid lip service to it. While citizens in other countries are now seeing soaring power rates, American householders can look forward to declining rates.

The North American exemplar of acting on the perceived threat of global warming is Ontario, which dismantled one of the continent’s finest fleets of coal plants in pursuit of becoming a green leader. Then, to induce developers to build uneconomic renewable energy facilities, the Ontario government paid them as much as 80 times the market rate for power. The result is power prices that rose rapidly (about 50% since 2005) and will continue to do so: Ontarians can expect power prices that are 46% higher over the next five years, according to a 2010 Ontario government estimate, and more than 100% higher according to independent estimates. The rest of Canada may not fare much better — the National Energy Board forecasts power prices 42% higher by 2035, while some estimates have Canadian power prices 50% higher by 2020.

The story throughout much of Europe is similar. Denmark, an early adopter of the global-warming mania, now requires its households to pay the developed world’s highest power prices — about 40¢ a kilowatt hour, or three to four times what North Americans pay today. Germany, whose powerhouse economy gave green developers a blank cheque, is a close second, followed by other politically correct nations such as Belgium, the headquarters of the EU, and distressed nations such as Spain.

The result is chaos to the economic well-being of the EU nations. Even in rock-solid Germany, up to 15% of the populace is now believed to be in “fuel poverty” — defined by governments as needing to spend more than 10% of the total household income on electricity and gas. Some 600,000 low-income Germans are now being cut off by their power companies annually, a number expected to increase as a never-ending stream of global-warming projects in the pipeline wallops customers. In the U.K., which has laboured under the most politically correct climate leadership in the world, some 12 million people are already in fuel poverty, 900,000 of them in wind-infested Scotland alone, and the U.K. has now entered a double-dip recession.

The U.S., in contrast, will see power rates decline starting next year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, dropping by more than 22% by the end of the decade and then staying flat to 2035. Why the fall? Mainly because the U.S. will rely overwhelmingly on fossil fuels in the years ahead, not just coal, which dominates the current power system, but increasingly natural gas, which is expected to account for 60% of all new generating capacity in the future. Thanks to fracking, the U.S. effectively has limitless amounts of inexpensive natural gas to add to its limitless coal....

Stevenson on Pepys...

(You almost certainly already know this, but Samuel Pepys' name was pronounced "peeps." I remember feeling awkward as a youth when my dad corrected my pronunciation. The Bezan was a dutch-built yacht. King Charles II, who Pepys served for much of his life, was the main inventor of yachting as a sport. The Hope is a stretch of the Thames below Gravesend.)

...The whole world, town or country, was to Pepys a garden of Armida. Wherever he went his steps were winged with the most eager expectation; whatever he did, it was done with the most lively pleasure. An insatiable curiosity in all the shows of the world and all the secrets of knowledge, filled him brimful of the longing to travel, and supported him in the toils of study. Rome was the dream of his life; he was never happier than when he read or talked of the Eternal City. When he was in Holland, he was 'with child' to see any strange thing. Meeting some friends and singing with them in a palace near the Hague, his pen fails him to express his passion of delight, 'the more so because in a heaven of pleasure and in a strange country.'

He must go to see all famous executions. He must needs visit the body of a murdered man, defaced 'with a broad wound,' he says, 'that makes my hand now shake to write of it.' He learned to dance, and was 'like to make a dancer.' He learned to sing, and walked about Gray's Inn Fields 'humming to myself (which is now my constant practice) the trillo.' He learned to play the lute, the flute, the flageolet, and the theorbo, and it was not the fault of his intention if he did not learn the harpsichord or the spinet. He learned to compose songs, and burned to give forth 'a scheme and theory of music not yet ever made in the world.' When he heard 'a fellow whistle like a bird exceeding well,' he promised to return another day and give an angel for a lesson in the art. Once, he writes, 'I took the Bezan back with me, and with a brave gale and tide reached up that night to the Hope, taking great pleasure in learning the seamen's manner of singing when they sound the depths.'

If he found himself rusty in his Latin grammar, he must fall to it like a schoolboy. He was a member of Harrington's Club till its dissolution, and of the Royal Society before it had received the name. Boyle's Hydrostatics was 'of infinite delight' to him, walking in Barnes Elms. We find him comparing Bible concordances, a captious judge of sermons, deep in Descartes and Aristotle. We find him, in a single year, studying timber and the measurement of timber; tar and oil, hemp, and the process of preparing cordage; mathematics and accounting; the hull and the rigging of ships from a model; and 'looking and improving himself of the (naval) stores with' – hark to the fellow! – 'great delight'...
---Robert Louis Stevenson

Oddball meditation...

I was just talking to my son the classicist, and he expressed curiosity about if some Marines were sent back in time to fight the Spartans, who would win.

I said that was a boring question. If spears are used, the Spartans obviously win. If firearms, the Marines win. The really interesting thing would be to send both groups to the 17th century, to duke it out with muskets and pikes.

My initial thought is that the Spartans would have the advantage. Pike work was, I think, trickier than musketry, and Spartan hoplites would grasp the concept right away. As an instance, here are some modern chaps handling pikes. (Re-enactors of the English Civil War.) Not too impressive, eh?

For the historically challenged, the matchlock musket of the 17th century fired slowly. Two or three shots a minute if you were skilled. And the musketeer was almost helpless in defense. A horseman could just ride by and cut him down. So the pikemen formed a bristling wall of points, mostly to protect the shooters. There was an intricate dance needed to bring the musketeers forward to shoot, then move them back among the pikes when danger approached. And to move the whole assembly across the battlefield without losing cohesion. (All this was made obsolete by the invention of the bayonet.)

This is pretty good...

What Lugar's loss could mean for a Pres. Romney :

...As I wrote earlier this week, a lot of pundits have been prematurely writing the obituary to the Tea Party, but Mourdock's victory demonstrates that the movement still has a lot of power. Tea Party activists will be tested again in Texas, where they hope to nominate Ted Cruz and Utah, where they hope to dump veteran Sen. Orrin Hatch in favor of conservative Dan Liljenquist. 

Mourdock's victory not only means that this particular Senate seat is likely to be more conservative (assuming he goes on to win the general election in this traditionally red state), but it also puts Republican Senators everywhere on notice that no seat is safe anywhere in the country. Any elected Republican that doesn't pursue a small government agenda once in office risks suffering the same fate as Lugar. Had Lugar hung on, then a lot of people would have dismissed the Tea Party as a passing fad from 2010. But now it's clear that the movement has been underestimated once again. Tea Partiers have a lot more staying power than skeptics expected.

With the Republican presidential nomination going to the ideologically malleable Mitt Romney, supporters of limited government have recognized that their best hope for advancing the conservative agenda rests on the ability to elect as many principled conservatives to Congress as possible. That is, lawmakers who will be willing to fight for smaller government even if it means standing up to a president of their own party. The more victories the Tea Party racks up, the greater the chance that Romney will be forced to govern as a limited government conservative if elected, even if his natural inclination is to migrate to the left....

The good thing about having a "malleable" president is that he will presumably be malleable in our direction too. Of course "malleable" usually tends Leftward, because that's the direction of nihilism and cowardice. But ..

We've seen this fraud so many times...

Delingpole, gotta love the guy!

There's a great scoop in The Australian today about more lying climate scientists making stuff up.

CLAIMS that some of Australia's leading climate change scientists were subjected to death threats as part of a vicious and unrelenting email campaign have been debunked by the Privacy Commissioner.

Timothy Pilgrim was called in to adjudicate on a Freedom of Information application in relation to Fairfax and ABC reports last June alleging that Australian National University climate change researchers were facing the ongoing campaign and had been moved to "more secure buildings" following explicit threats.

Needless to say the University did everything it could to prevent the investigation, arguing that the release of the climate scientists' emails (why am I getting an eerie sense of deja vu here?) "would or could reasonably be expected to…endanger the life or physical safety of any person". But doughty Sydney blogger Simon Turnill appealed against this stonewalling drivel and won. And here's what was revealed when the 11 relevant emails were eventually released. Ten of the documents "did not contain threats to kill or threats of harm."

Of the 11th, the Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim said: "I consider the danger to life or physical safety in this case to be only a possibility, not a real chance."

No wonder the university was so keen to keep things quiet. Contrary to the claims of the "climate" "scientists" – widely reported, of course, in the left-wing media – there had been no death threats whatsoever. Yet their vice-chancellor at the time – now the Australian government's Chief Scientist – Professor Ian Chubb decided to move them to "more secure buildings" without, he now admits, having read the emails to see whether these threats actually existed.

Maybe it's time someone did an FOI to see whether the UEA's dodgy and discredited Phil Jones really did get any of those "death threats" he claims to have received after Climategate and which allegedly drove him to consider suicide....

It reminds me of the good old days of the Iraq campaign. Remember how lefty politicians, when challenged on their appeasing policies, would whimper, "How dare you question my patriotism!"

The "Peace Studies" malarky should be the tip-off...

Walter Russell Mead, Europe’s Jew Hatred Isn’t Just On The Fringe:

...Not so, alas. Norway’s Johan Galtung is no ordinary professor of sociology. Known worldwide as the “father of peace studies,” Galtung is famous for his work on the peaceful resolution of conflict. He is the founder of the Peace Research Institute in Oslo and the Journal of Peace Research, the recipient of numerous awards, accolades, and honorary degrees and professorships, as well as a hugely prolific writer on issues of peace and conflict. His Wikipedia entry calls him the “principal founder of the discipline of peace and conflict studies,” a discipline offered at universities around the world. He lived through the German occupation of Norway during WWII and saw his father arrested by the Nazis.

Galtung has long been a respected and influential member of the European academy. He is no immigrant from the Middle East and is not identified with any fringe political movements. He is as establishment as they come.

And he is also a vicious and hate-spewing anti-Semite.

In remarks at the University of Oslo and a follow-up email exchange with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Galtung betrayed his true feelings on Jews.

He hinted at links between Anders Behring Breivik’s attack on civilians in Norway and Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency. He suggested there was some truth behind the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He said that Jews share some of the blame for what happened at Auschwitz — they had provoked the poor Germans under the Weimar Republic. He suggested that Jews control the American media and academic establishments. The list goes on and on — the kind of remarks that haters call “common sense” and “daring to tell the truth” but that sane people see as hatred, error and bile....

What fascinates me is that Mead, an intellectual giant, has no explanation for this. He doesn't even make a stab at one. And I, a mere pygmy, have the answer. (OK, OK, I think I have the answer.) He should read RJ.

To boil it down, probably too far, the conventional view is that religious faith in the West has been declining over many centuries. I don't think that is true. Rather, overt Christian and Jewish worship has been declining. BUT, people remained "religious," because they retained many of the habits of thought that derived from faith. They continued to believe in objective truth, for instance. And in objective morality. And many traditional Christian moral beliefs. (They thought divorce and abortion were wrong. And that it is admirable to be a "good Samaritan.") They retained the idea that they might join some cause or truth, even if they had not yet done so. These are all things that are bigger than the "self." All are holdovers from Jewish and Christian faith.

But, habits wear off. These wore off, for many people, around the middle of the 20th century. (Yes, it ties in with the book I'm writing on the transition to the Information Age. They are inter-connected. I'll resist the temptation to go into that now.)

The result was nihilism. That is, as I define it, the lack of any cause or belief bigger than ones self. Maybe for 20%, or 30% of Americans. And for even bigger percentages in Europe. This change in thinking was HUGE! And its effects are seen all around us.

For instance, most of those people assumed disguises, to cover their spiritual nakedness. The most popular one was "liberal." Followed by "pacifist." That's where the "Peace Studies" baloney comes from. Galtung has never accomplished anything in actually promoting peace. But no one cares. The point is, war is vastly offensive to the nihilist.

Why? Because what he hates is belief. And war symbolizes belief, belief that there is something worth fighting for. Even dying for.

I predict, even without knowing anything about him, that Galtung also hates or sneers at America, armed citizens, war (even against the worst tyrants), Israel, Western Civilization, traditional morality, and traditional art and architecture. And most of all, he hates Jews. All symbolize (and I think people mostly react to symbols, not conscious thought) belief in something greater than the self. All are symbolically God.

(I can explain all these points in much greater detail, if anyone cares. Or there are other posts here.)

"Formula of lament"

I used to read the mysterious Catholic commentator "Diogenes" with avidity. He's gone silent these last few years. But you can still search for his work at CatholicCulture.org

I just stumbled upon this tidbit, at the post: 3 Degrees Kelvin:

...ATTENTION ALL ACADEMICIANS: First-person complaints of a "chilling effect" are performatively (retorsively) self-refuting. For: no agency so trammeled by cliché as to make use of the term "chilling effect" has any intellectual heat to cool off (Diogenes' First Law of Thermo-semantics). For the sake of your own reputations, please find another formula of lament.

Analogous to making more money by lowering the price of the product...

I thought this piece, Rethinking the War on Drugs - WSJ.com, was very interesting. I don't have any policy recommendations, but I'm glad people are thinking in new ways...

...Larry Long, a district court judge in South Dakota, developed one promising approach, called 24/7 Sobriety. Started in 2005, it requires people who commit alcohol-related crimes—originally just repeat offenders for drunken driving but now other offenders—to show up twice a day, every day, for a breathalyzer test as a condition of staying out of jail. If they fail to appear, or if the test shows they have been drinking, they go straight to jail for a day.

More than 99% of the time, they show up as ordered, sober. They can go to alcohol treatment, or not, as they choose; what they can't choose is to keep drinking. According to the state attorney general's office, some 20,000 South Dakotans have participated in 24/7 Sobriety (a large number for state with just 825,000 residents), and the program has made a big dent in rearrests for DUI.

By distinguishing sharply between people who use alcohol badly and the larger population of non-problem users, 24/7 Sobriety moves past the simple dichotomy of either banning a drug entirely or making it legal in unlimited quantities for all adults....

The interesting ting is that the penalty is minor--one day in jail! So there is no hesitation or difficulty in applying it.

...Having to call in every day to find out whether it is your day to be tested turns out to be powerful help in staying clean. As one probationer told a researcher, "Knowing I had to make that phone call the next morning ruined the high." Leighton Iles's Swift program in Texas has recorded equally impressive results, and there are promising pilot efforts with parolees in Seattle and Sacramento.

Substantial progress in suppressing the drug use of arrestees would be a great boon. It would deprive the illicit drug markets of their most valuable customers, which would, in turn, reduce violence in inner-city neighborhoods and take the pressure off Latin American countries now racked by drug dealing...

"Humility... is the simple grace of being in the right place"

Fr. Dwight, writing on the question of why women cannot become priests....

...Finally, the argument, at its heart, also has nothing to do with "equality". I realize that to say so bluntly may make some people howl with rage. This is because at the very heart of the Catholic faith we believe in something greater than "equality". We believe in a principle we might call "equity".

Equity is the quality of being fair, objective, unbiased and even handed. Equity has more to do with giving everyone what they deserve rather than giving everyone the same thing. Equity is the idea that everyone has their rightful place in society, in the family, in the church, and ultimately in the cosmos, and that true justice is a matter of each person eventually finding their own rightful place in the greater order of things.

Dante's picture of heaven is of each person in the cosmos being in exactly the right place in relationship to God, and therefore in relationship to one another. As this is attained each person finds total peace, or as he says, "Our Peace in His Will". The achievement of this "perfect place" is the work of a lifetime. It is the work of a lifetime of prayer, surrender, mystery and service. This "place of peace"; this equity of heaven is also the result of humility.

Humility is understanding our rightful place and being there. Humility is not abject groveling, but the simple grace of being in the right place. Furthermore, this humble fact of being in the right place grants us not only humility, but great dignity. I am where I should be and where no one else should be. I am who I am. I am who God has made me to be. I am in my unique place in the divine economy. This individual dignity is far greater and the freedom that comes with it grants me much greater peace than I would ever find by seeking to be someone else just because I want to be "equal" to them.

Obedience to the divine will and submission to the divine teaching is the only way to attain this equity.  I am not writing this to women telling them to be submissive and shut up and know their place.

I am writing this to myself.

"Conservatism by inertia"

I recently stumbled upon an old nut I'd squirreled away, by Orrin Judd from 2003. He's writing on a piece by Roger Scruton, Decencies for Skeptics: Is religion necessary to make a moral society? No; but reverence is. (Roger Scruton, City Journal)

I think I liked the term "conservatism by inertia," but never got around to blogging it and remembering it...

Mr. Scruton represents that worthwhile but tragic strain of British thought that combines skepticism and nostalgia to produce a kind of conservatism by inertia--we can't believe in anything, but Britain was great when we did, so let's not get rid of everything we had then, let's act as if we still believe in something. This is the Right's version of "freeloading atheism".

But rational skepticism has a fatal flaw--one that renders it quite dubious as the basis of a political philosophy--it ultimately disproves itself and reason entirely. Having once denied that we can know anything with certainty about reality through the exercise of pure reason, one has denied the reality, reason, and the self. They can only be recouped by the exercise of faith. So the great response to the skepticism of Hume and Berkley is not an elaborate theory but Samuel Johnson kicking a large stone and exclaiming: "I deny it thus". No matter how taut their theory may be, no one will choose to live their life by it. We all believe certain things to be real, most especially ourselves, and, therefore, accepting their proof as valid, we all proceed from a stance of faith. That genie too is out of the bottle.

When Mr. Scruton then argues, quite accurately, that reason can offer no coherent basis for morality, that only religion can, we must ask: so what? Reason couldn't prove that you and I exist, but that does not truly make us doubt that we do. And when we turn to look at all of humanity today and all of human history, if we perceive, as we must, that you and I are rather insignificant, but that morality matters greatly, who is so self-absorbed that they would argue that faith is sufficient to prove our own measly existence but we can have no recourse to it to prove that the morality upon which decent human society depends likewise exists? The claim that I can utilize personal faith in order to know myself to be real but that any faith I disagree with, including (especially) one shared by billions of my fellow men, is necessarily illusion, because mere faith, is nought but egomania.