The sovereign is the one that makes exceptions. That’s the famous aphoristic summary of Carl Schmitt on political theory. It’s intuitively compelling while intuitively incomplete.

Schmitt is usually thought of as a theorist in the fascist ballpark. His aphorism, however, points in a democratic direction. It suggests that every institution includes an implied arrangement for nullifying top down decisions by lower level individuals doing something different through recalcitrance.  Every democracy is Irish democracy. (more…)

1. All American children used to grow up hearing the story of how little George Washington cut down a cherry tree, then confessed to the deed by saying, “I cannot tell a lie.”

2. It is generally agreed among historians, even those not disposed to tear down the reputations of the Founding Fathers, that the cherry tree story was an invention of Parson Weems.

3. Therefore, George Washington almost certainly did not exist, and we need to stop hurting people by making such a fetish of honesty based on fairy tales like these.

Q.E.D.

[Following are the final two paragraphs from James Thurber’s “Sex Ex Machina” which first appeared in The New Yorker, March 13, 1937.]

I should like to end with the case history of a friend of mine in Ohio named Harvey Lake. When he was only nineteen, the steering bar of an old electric runabout broke of in his hand, causing the machine to carry him through a fence and into the grounds of the Columbus School for Girls. He developed a fear of automobiles, trains, and every other kind of vehicle that was not pulled by a horse. (more…)

The Independent reports on a detailed genetic study of the British population. Many historic and prehistoric demographic events show up, but some don’t:

“Other major events in history, such as the Roman invasion and occupation between 43AD and 410AD, the large-scale invasion by the Viking Danes in 865AD and the subsequent establishment of Danelaw, as well as the Norman invasion of 1066, cannot be seen in the genetic profiles of Britons today.

“This probably reflects the fact that often major cultural shifts are carried out by relatively few people within an elite who do not leave their genetic mark on the conquered masses, said Sir Walter Bodmer, the veteran population geneticist who first had the idea of the study.”

Something worth remembering the next time DNA and the Book of Mormon comes up.

Bruce Charlton is thinking deeply about the Atonement. He is working out alternatives to the customary belief that Christ took on the punitive consequences of sin for us and to the customary liberal notion that the atonement was fundamentally an act of symbolic engineering to excise our retrograde belief in sin and guilt. Charlton thinks he’s found one. (more…)

I did a search for “BYU” on Twitter on Saturday night to look for articles about the Cougars’ thrilling basketball victory over Gonzaga.* Instead I got a steady stream of 17- and 18-year-old Mormon kids either celebrating getting into BYU or lamenting their rejection letters. It’s that time of year. (more…)

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Love is not best considered as a feeling, it is not necessarily something at the forefront of consciousness. For many people, their deepest love is something which structures their life, rather than being at the front of our conscious deliberations for most of the time. Some (I am one of them) are very expressive of love – but this is not a necessity; and some very loving cultures and families and marriages do not go in for statements, hugs or tears.

*

My understanding of the absolute necessity of loving God above all else is metaphysical rather than psychological – that without this, all other loves (including the love of Jesus) lose their meaning and function.

The supremacy of our love for God is that it makes all other loves possible – it makes other loves a matter of eternal significance.

-thus Bruce Charlton.

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“European demographers even have an elegant name for the phenomenon: They call it the Second Demographic Transition (the First being the shift from high birth rates and death rates to low ones that began in Europe in the early industrial era and by now encompasses almost every society). In the schema of the Second Demographic Transition, long, stable marriages are out, and divorce or separation are in, along with serial cohabitation and increasingly contingent liaisons. Not surprisingly, this new environment of perennially conditional, no-fault unions was also seen as ushering in an era of more or less permanent sub-replacement fertility.

“According to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistical agency, the probability of marriage before age 50 has been plummeting for European women and men, while the chance of divorce for those who do marry has been soaring. In Belgium—the birth-land of the scholars who initially detected this Second Transition—the likelihood of a first marriage for a woman of reproductive age is now down to 40%, and the likelihood of divorce is over 50%. This means that in Belgium the odds of getting married and staying married are under one in five. A number of other European countries have similar or even lower odds.”

(From “The global flight from the family” by Nicholas Eberstadt, found at AEI and mentioned at Marginal Revolution)