Mary's excellent piece makes me think of the veritable Navy of British kayakers I saw one summer on the Dordogne River, paddling busily past the Chateau de Beynac, a key fortress in the Hundred Years War. Question: were the holiday boaters instrumentalizing the river more or less than Richard the Lionheart and his legions?
It also calls to mind a far more personal experience. Having lived in Asia for a lengthy clip with the benefit of charming of industrious domestic help (read as written), I can say in hindsight that great domestic help was as much a minus as a plus for our family. My wife and I each had chores to do growing up; our kids had no chores. I would sometimes try to find them some, but to no avail. As soon as the helper learned of it, she would do it first thing the next day, even if it meant taking out an already-empty trash bag. All of which is a pleasure over a week or two, but less so over several years.
Chores are the ligaments of a household, which is the inner sanctum of the family. Imagine a cathedral church service in which the janitor swings the incense and lights the candles (no offense, janitors). But you do it because you can, and tell yourself its more efficient, it frees you up to do more important things. And some parents freed themselves up quite a bit more, having drivers drop off and pick up their kids, make the meals, do the shopping, you name it. The pros are it is efficient and everything gets done and you don't have to lift a finger. The cons are that your kids get to be 12 years old and have never teamed up with you to jointly tackle a practical need, nor did they ever tackle one solo for the family. The pro is significant and obvious; the con is huge and oblique.
Perhaps that was the Nomos of the Expat Household, exacerbated by a good amount of Airport Nomos as well. It is a thinning down of life towards an existence of escapist me-time, which is luxurious as a flow and dehumanizing as a stock. Likewise, David Goodheart's Anywhere People vs. Somewhere People are Mary's digital nomads. Her linking them to Camus' replacism is brilliant. Touche.
But did something change a century ago? Is Taylor some rough beast that slouched in to presage War? I don't think so. I agree with Mary that Ellul and Schmitt and Heidegger are right about the instrumentalism of technology, but technology in any form is a force multiplier, not a primary resource or base force. The base force, as it were, is us, with our brains and hearts that act but never change.
Re Camus part 2, I agree with it entirely. I think the reason elite types get so fussed over Camus is that he so precisely calls out the morally empty reality over which they preside. I may say his insights also accord with what I have felt, for some time, to be the core failing of modern Conservatism: that it has very largely dispensed with the cultural outlook, its historic heartland, in favour of the bluntly economic - in a Taylorist or even neo-Darwinism sense. Hence accusations of the Tories being 'the nasty party'. For far too long they have been functionally illiterate when it comes to culture, and now it is coming back to haunt them. Meanwhile, cultural conservative parties are making inroads all across Europe, prompted by the mass immigration that left and right have blithely encouraged for decades. If that doesn't speak to a lingering desire, and need, to preserve our historical cultural identities, I don't know what does.
I wrote a defence of St Paul’s passage in Ephesians outlining the respective duties of husbands and wives, a passage so controversial that in some parishes the most offending, ‘misogynistic’ lines are crossed out. The Catholic paper my piece was published in (Alive, a publication the Irish Dominicans) does not have an online edition so I will post it on my Substack page later this evening. It maps rather interestingly on to this second section of Mary’s reflection.
> some individuals may be more naturally disposed than others not to be leaders, but to be led. This is perhaps the most taboo possibility of all: so much so that the founding constitution of the modern world’s only superpower explicitly disavows it. But what if, in fact, all men are not created equal? What if some individuals genuinely prefer, outside as well as inside the BDSM safety-zone, to accept authority rather than to seek it?
Honestly, I think this demonstrates a misunderstanding of the notion that "all men are created equal." Equal does not mean "identical." For example, if I buy a car for $30,000, it is equal in value to $30,000. But I can't then turn around and trade 1/30,000 of my car for an item that costs $1. To even make the attempt would be ridiculous!
I wrote about this last year:
> The idea that was so clear to Thomas Jefferson that he wrote that it was a “self-evident” truth, that all men are created equal? That’s not obvious at all to most people. What’s self-evident to anyone with eyes is that some people are taller than others, some are stronger, some are more beautiful, more intelligent, and so on. “All men” are obviously created highly unequal in virtually every way! And most civilizations throughout history have acknowledged this and never looked any deeper. But in a culture suffused with Protestant values, the notion that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28) creates a transcendent bond, an equality of all mankind as children of God so fundamental that even a famously impious “freethinker” such as Jefferson saw it as self-evident.
Mary's excellent piece makes me think of the veritable Navy of British kayakers I saw one summer on the Dordogne River, paddling busily past the Chateau de Beynac, a key fortress in the Hundred Years War. Question: were the holiday boaters instrumentalizing the river more or less than Richard the Lionheart and his legions?
It also calls to mind a far more personal experience. Having lived in Asia for a lengthy clip with the benefit of charming of industrious domestic help (read as written), I can say in hindsight that great domestic help was as much a minus as a plus for our family. My wife and I each had chores to do growing up; our kids had no chores. I would sometimes try to find them some, but to no avail. As soon as the helper learned of it, she would do it first thing the next day, even if it meant taking out an already-empty trash bag. All of which is a pleasure over a week or two, but less so over several years.
Chores are the ligaments of a household, which is the inner sanctum of the family. Imagine a cathedral church service in which the janitor swings the incense and lights the candles (no offense, janitors). But you do it because you can, and tell yourself its more efficient, it frees you up to do more important things. And some parents freed themselves up quite a bit more, having drivers drop off and pick up their kids, make the meals, do the shopping, you name it. The pros are it is efficient and everything gets done and you don't have to lift a finger. The cons are that your kids get to be 12 years old and have never teamed up with you to jointly tackle a practical need, nor did they ever tackle one solo for the family. The pro is significant and obvious; the con is huge and oblique.
Perhaps that was the Nomos of the Expat Household, exacerbated by a good amount of Airport Nomos as well. It is a thinning down of life towards an existence of escapist me-time, which is luxurious as a flow and dehumanizing as a stock. Likewise, David Goodheart's Anywhere People vs. Somewhere People are Mary's digital nomads. Her linking them to Camus' replacism is brilliant. Touche.
But did something change a century ago? Is Taylor some rough beast that slouched in to presage War? I don't think so. I agree with Mary that Ellul and Schmitt and Heidegger are right about the instrumentalism of technology, but technology in any form is a force multiplier, not a primary resource or base force. The base force, as it were, is us, with our brains and hearts that act but never change.
Re Camus part 2, I agree with it entirely. I think the reason elite types get so fussed over Camus is that he so precisely calls out the morally empty reality over which they preside. I may say his insights also accord with what I have felt, for some time, to be the core failing of modern Conservatism: that it has very largely dispensed with the cultural outlook, its historic heartland, in favour of the bluntly economic - in a Taylorist or even neo-Darwinism sense. Hence accusations of the Tories being 'the nasty party'. For far too long they have been functionally illiterate when it comes to culture, and now it is coming back to haunt them. Meanwhile, cultural conservative parties are making inroads all across Europe, prompted by the mass immigration that left and right have blithely encouraged for decades. If that doesn't speak to a lingering desire, and need, to preserve our historical cultural identities, I don't know what does.
I wrote a defence of St Paul’s passage in Ephesians outlining the respective duties of husbands and wives, a passage so controversial that in some parishes the most offending, ‘misogynistic’ lines are crossed out. The Catholic paper my piece was published in (Alive, a publication the Irish Dominicans) does not have an online edition so I will post it on my Substack page later this evening. It maps rather interestingly on to this second section of Mary’s reflection.
> some individuals may be more naturally disposed than others not to be leaders, but to be led. This is perhaps the most taboo possibility of all: so much so that the founding constitution of the modern world’s only superpower explicitly disavows it. But what if, in fact, all men are not created equal? What if some individuals genuinely prefer, outside as well as inside the BDSM safety-zone, to accept authority rather than to seek it?
Honestly, I think this demonstrates a misunderstanding of the notion that "all men are created equal." Equal does not mean "identical." For example, if I buy a car for $30,000, it is equal in value to $30,000. But I can't then turn around and trade 1/30,000 of my car for an item that costs $1. To even make the attempt would be ridiculous!
I wrote about this last year:
> The idea that was so clear to Thomas Jefferson that he wrote that it was a “self-evident” truth, that all men are created equal? That’s not obvious at all to most people. What’s self-evident to anyone with eyes is that some people are taller than others, some are stronger, some are more beautiful, more intelligent, and so on. “All men” are obviously created highly unequal in virtually every way! And most civilizations throughout history have acknowledged this and never looked any deeper. But in a culture suffused with Protestant values, the notion that “there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28) creates a transcendent bond, an equality of all mankind as children of God so fundamental that even a famously impious “freethinker” such as Jefferson saw it as self-evident.
> https://robertfrank.substack.com/p/the-myth-of-prosperity
There's no particular reason why people's diverse views and preferences regarding power and power-dynamic relationships should be any different.