Housecarls at Hastings

God is first described as a father and second as a king.  We could stand to be more patriarchal than we are, but we at least have experience of fatherhood and take God’s fatherhood seriously. Small r-republicans that we are, we ignore exploring His monarchy.

Let’s fix that.

We in the Church are an elite group who are oath-bound to God and to each other.  We live a stricter rule than most Christians.  The God to whom we have pledged everything in return gives us magnificent gifts and in certain places marvelous titles of power.  He calls us his noble and great ones and has sworn fellowship with us.  Because of us, he also promises the same to our ancestors and our descendants.

We are God’s housecarls, we are his warband.  He has ennobled us, us and our whole lines.

From Scott Alexander’s review of Inadequate Equilibria:

Or, to take a ridiculous example from the text that will obviously never happen:

Suppose that there’s a magical tower that only people with IQs of at least 100 and some amount of conscientiousness can enter, and this magical tower slices four years off your lifespan. The natural next thing that happens is that employers start to prefer prospective employees who have proved they can enter the tower, and employers offer these employees higher salaries, or even make entering the tower a condition of being employed at all. The natural next thing that happens is that employers start to demand that prospective employees show a certificate saying that they’ve been inside the tower. This makes everyone want to go to the tower, which enables somebody to set up a fence around the tower and charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to let people in.

Now, fortunately, after Tower One is established and has been running for a while, somebody tries to set up a competing magical tower, Tower Two, that also drains four years of life but charges less money to enter. Unfortunately, there’s a subtle way in which this competing Tower Two is hampered by the same kind of lock-in that prevents a jump from [Facebook to a competing social network]. Initially, all of the smartest people headed to Tower One. Since Tower One had limited room, it started discriminating further among its entrants, only taking the ones that have IQs above the minimum, or who are good at athletics or have rich parents or something. So when Tower Two comes along, the employers still prefer employees from Tower One, which has a more famous reputation. So the smartest people still prefer to apply to Tower One, even though it costs more money. This stabilizes Tower One’s reputation as being the place where the smartest people go.

In other words, the signaling equilibrium is a two-factor market in which the stable point, Tower One, is cemented in place by the individually best choices of two different parts of the system. Employers prefer Tower One because it’s where the smartest people go. Smart employees prefer Tower One because employers will pay them more for going there. If you try dissenting from the system unilaterally, without everyone switching at the same time, then as an employer you end up hiring the less-qualified people from Tower Two, or as an employee, you end up with lower salary offers after you go to Tower Two. So the system is stable as a matter of individual incentives, and stays in place. If you try to set up a cheaper alternative to the whole Tower system, the default thing that happens to you is that people who couldn’t handle the Towers try to go through your new system, and it acquires a reputation for non-prestigious weirdness and incompetence.

Sometimes the towers take more than four years off your life.  Sometimes they destroy your chance for family.

Some towers offer a devilish bargain when you walk in the door.  They will give you your four years of life back–but you have to agree to drink and drug until you can tolerate strangers having sex with you. But this isn’t wildly recognized as a devilish bargain because the devil is clever.  He doesn’t offer it as a bargain at all.  Instead, there is a cultural expectation that anesthetizing yourself like a whore to let your body be used like a whore is the exciting part of Tower Time.  It is as if there were a widespread notion that the best part of receiving riches and power from the devil was the chance to offload your soul.

There are a few niche towers where in exchange for not losing four years of your life you get marriage and maybe a first child.  These are viewed as retrograde and oppressive.

There is a rumor that there used to be a mythic tower where you didn’t lose four years of life if you sought beauty and wisdom.  The employers don’t like the rumor, because if there were another reason to go to the Towers other than getting a good job,  you couldn’t count on Tower alums having the proper careerist mindset.  The Towers hate the rumors as a vampire hates garlic.

And now I have to touch upon a very sad matter. There are in the modern world an admirable class of persons who do long for the old feasts and formalities of the childhood of the world.  William Morris and his followers shoed how much brighter were the dark ages than the age of Manchester.  Mr. W.B. Yeats frames his steps in prehistoric dances, but no man knows and joins his voice to the forgotten choruses that no one but he can hear.  Mr. George Moore collects every fragment of Irish paganism that the forgetfulness of the Catholic Church has left or possibly her wisdom preserved.  There are innumerable persons with eye-glasses and green garments who pray for the return of the maypole or the Olympian games.  There there is about these people a haunting and alarming something which suggests that it is just possible that they do not keep Christmas.

It is painful to regard human nature in such a light, but it seems somehow possible that Mr. George Moore does not wave his spoon and shout when the pudding is set alight.  It is even possible that Mr. W.B. Yeats never pulls crackers.

If so, where is the sense of all their dreams of festive traditions?  Here is a solid and ancient festive tradition still plying a roaring trade in the streets, and they think it vulgar.  If this is so, let them be very certain of this, that they are the kind of people who in the time of the maypole would have thought the maypole vulgar; who in the time of the Canterbury pilgrimage would have thought the Canterbury pilgrimage vulgar; who in the time of the Olympian games would have thought the Olympian games vulgar.  Nor can there be an reasonable doubt that they were vulgar.

-thus G.K. Chesterton

The problem with “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die,” is the “for tomorrow we die.”It is the justification.  Seizing a last few defiant gasps of happiness before the great dark is a lie.  Rejoicing now in anticipation of greater rejoicing later is the true rule of the universe.

After the requisite soul-searching and angst and all that, Nephi cut off Laban’s head, snicker-snack. He probably did not know at the time that he was setting up a type of Christ. (more…)

Diagramming sentences teaches you a good deal about language.  It also makes you realize some odd things about it that you had taken for granted before.  Grammar is not the Platonic form of language.  What it is is a good tool.

The West doesn’t think much about virtue.  We do have a rich and neglected treasury of practical experience out there, and a decent amount of engineering knowledge, for those who look for it.  We also have thinkers who address first principles and meta-ethical questions.  What is the nature of the good? and so on.  What we don’t have is anything in between.  It is as if the study of biology knew evolution (along side stockbreeders who knew practical things) but had never invented anything like taxonomy.

A while back I accidentally invented a sophisticated tool for investigating virtue.

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A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

And by chance there came down a certain woke priest that way; and when he saw the man he returned to Jerusalem and launched a campaign for travel control, so only licensed travelers with adequate provision to defend themselves against robbers would be allowed out on the road. Those he met were impressed with his compassion and wealthy caravanners donated to his campaign. #CareforTravelers

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I have nostalgia for lives I’ve never lived.

I was just driving through a tiny foothills Spanish colonial landgrant.  There are a few small adobes, willows and cottonwoods by the streams, a twisted apple tree, a few cattle, stacks of firewood, everyone related.  And I felt a strong sense of the distinctness and value of their life.  And an attraction, like nostalgia.

That’s what the best tourism usually is.  Nostalgia for unlived lives.  Imaginative communion with them. (more…)

A friend said, forget politics, the basic program for righting the world is three simple steps.

1. Get yourself together.
2. Get a good family going.
3. Get your kids to repeat steps 1-3.

He’s right.

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A certain man fell among thieves, and was robbed and beaten and left for dead.

A Levite walking by took a selfie pic with a concerned face, and posted it to Facebook, with the comment that somebody should do something and it was time to stop the hate. It got lots of likes and re-shares.

And a priest walking by also saw the man, and a took a photo, and tweeted it, #NoMoreRepublicanSpendingCuts. And lo, the hashtag trended, and a celebrity did retweet it. And verily the counter hashtag, #VictimLivesMatter, which shared a clip of a Democratic congressman calling for an end to oppressive policing in the Jerusalem area, also trended.

And a Samaritan passed by, who possessed not even a smart phone, neither did he watch the news. And he had compassion on the man, and bound his wounds, and took care of him.

Who then was this man’s neighbor?

Every year there is an end to Christmas day and an end to the Christmas season.  It is always a bit melancholy.  Each of us will have a last Christmas of our life.  That will be a bit melancholy too.

Our kind of Christmas will end someday too.  Someday there will be a Last Christmas within the circle of the world.

But this year I have had an intimation that at the true last Christmas, Christ will be there.  It will not be sad at all. (more…)

This was our family’s smoothest, most comfortable Christmas that I can recall.  No stress, no melancholy, lots of coziness.

• We bought two presents for each child.  One small, one medium.  The kids didn’t miss the extra presents and it makes it much easier on us.  Less mess, less wrapping, less arrangements.

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Today we will sing the hymns of Christmas and take the sacrament.

One of the several things a belief in and love of the supernatural does is increase one’s admiration for nature.

If nothing else, looking at the intricacy of nature as a divine handiwork makes one grateful for the gift the creator bestows by crafting the stars to look as they do; or planets and comets in their careers; or the rings of Saturn and his moons like Christmas tree ornaments; or snowy mountain crags; or thunderstorms at sea; stately oaks with crooked limbs;or hawks on the wing; or horses who race with manes like banners flying; or the look of a girl just turning her head to expose the line of her throat and the curve of her cheek; or the laughter of a child ringing; or the shapes of leaves of beech and ash and elm; the whisper of wind in wintery branches; the crash of the surf at the strand; the energetic dance of butterflies in a sunlit meadow; the ungainly speed of the ostrich; the whistle of birds at dawn; the twitch of a rabbit’s nose; the sweetness of honeycombs; the intricate mathematical beauty of crystals and chemicals; the abstract elegance of a noble helium atom.

If all this was merely the product of blind forces, it is certainly amazing, but the amazement is merely within our brains, and has no further meaning. If all of this is handiwork, it was made for you.

It is a gift, just as much as the child God sent to the Virgin on this day to redeem all these things from time and death.

And if it is a gift, then let us give thanks and rejoice, because gratitude is the only thing that makes life not just endurable, but joyful

-thus John C. Wright.

In hymns today we will rejoice with sound and lips and tongue and soul and feeling.  Spirit and flesh.  (more…)

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My muse has updated the parable of the Good Samaritan.  (more…)

I was inspired by Bruce C.’s recent post on poverty and Steve Reed’s comment on the scriptures yielding multiple interpretations.  Specifically, I was inspired to think about the parable of the Good Samaritan.

I do not reject the standard interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan, in which the point is that everyone is our “neighbor.”  I accept the authority of both tradition and the prophets.

But there is another interpretation, which actually fits the story better. (more…)